My Review of the Original iPad

Yours truly, back in April 2010:

After the iPad was announced, I got two types of emails from readers. The first group saying they were disappointed, because they had been hoping I was right that The Tablet would be Apple’s reconception of personal computing.

The second group wrote to tell me how excited they were because I was right that The Tablet would be Apple’s reconception of personal computing.

Count me in with the second group. Apple hasn’t thought of everything with iPad, but what they’ve thought about, they’ve thought about very deeply. I got mine Saturday morning, and I’ve been using it since — or at least as often as I could get it away from my son. Here are my thoughts.

Nothing hammers home for me just how long 10 years is more than looking at that photo.

The whole thing feels fast fast fast. The only thing that feels slow overall, so far, is web page rendering. Not because it’s slower than the iPhone — it’s not, it’s definitely much faster — but because it’s so much slower than my MacBook Pro. It’s easy to forget on modern PC-class hardware just how computationally expensive HTML rendering is.

The funny thing is, the iPad, in raw CPU terms, is a far slower machine than a modern Mac. But the iPad is running a lightweight OS and lightweight apps. It’s like a slower runner with a lighter backpack who can win a race against a faster runner wearing a heavier backpack.

Ten years later, iPadOS is still significantly lighter weight than MacOS, but Apple’s custom-designed ARM CPUs are faster than the Intel chips in MacBooks.

★ Tuesday, 28 January 2020