The most recent effort in tablets had been made by Bill Gates and Microsoft in 2002. Working with most of the companies that made Windows desktops and laptops, it released machines with software that—among other things—allowed you to take notes while recording a speech that would be synchronized with the speaker’s recorded voice. Touch a part of your notes with the stylus and the device took you to the proper part of the recording. But the machines were no lighter than a laptop. Their battery life was no better. They weren’t cheaper. And they all ran Windows, which, while modified for the tablet, wasn’t written originally with tablets in mind. By 2009—even though tablet PCs were still being sold—it felt as if the Amazon Kindle were the only thing available that even resembled a tablet. Amazon had come out with the clunky electronic reader at the end of 2007, and it was increasingly popular. But it wasn’t really a tablet. It had a black-and-white screen that was great to read text on. But that’s all it effectively did. It displayed graphics and photos badly, and its Internet connection was only useful for downloading books.
All of this made doing a tablet risky for Jobs, especially with Google breathing down his neck. Some wondered if it didn’t make it too risky. But it also made a tablet the perfect project for Jobs to tackle. He had already reimagined the personal computer, the portable music player, and the cell phone. He made them better and more mainstream—the way Henry Ford had reimagined the automobile.
And Jobs did truly reimagine the tablet with the iPad. It did almost everything a laptop did. In addition, it was a quarter the weight—one pound eight ounces. It had three times the battery life—ten hours. It had a touchscreen like the iPhone and turned on like one too—without booting up. Because it came with a cell phone and Wi-Fi chip, it was always connected to the Internet. Cell phone connections for laptops were typically expensive add-ons. The iPad did all this for $600, when many laptops cost twice that. And there was no learning curve for consumers because it came with almost the same software that was on an iPhone. It ran iPhone apps. For those who didn’t want to use its virtual keyboard, it connected flawlessly to physical wireless keyboards. Apple also said it had rewritten its own office software—Pages, Numbers, and Keynote—to take advantage of the touchscreen.
The foundation of Jobs’s iPad pitch was counterintuitive. But most don’t buy a laptop for the tasks they were originally designed for—heavy office work, such as writing, crafting presentations, or financial analysis with spreadsheets. They use it mostly to communicate via email, text, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook; to browse the Internet; and to consume media such as books, movies, TV shows, music, photos, games, and videos. Jobs said that you could do all this on an iPhone, but the screen was too small to make it comfortable. You could also do it all on a laptop, but the keyboard and the trackpad made it too bulky, and the short battery life often left you tethered to a power outlet. What the world needed was a device in the middle that combined the best of both—something that was “more intimate than a laptop, and so much more capable than a smartphone,” he said.
As the father of the Macintosh, Jobs had more credibility than anyone else to reimagine the PC and challenge the conventional wisdom about tablets. But he still spent the first five minutes of his presentation making sure the world understood that he’d assessed that issue from every angle. Then he plopped into the Le Corbusier chair he’d had set up on the stage and, for the next fifteen minutes, as if he were in his living room, showed the world how he read The New York Times and Time magazine, bought movie tickets, looked at animal pictures on National Geographic, sent email, looked through a photo album, listened to the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan, navigated to a satellite picture of the Eiffel Tower, found a San Francisco sushi restaurant with Google Maps, watched the famous surfing-dog video on YouTube, and watched scenes from the movies Up and Star Trek. Later he unveiled the iBooks store and showed how it was better and easier to read a book on an iPad than on a Kindle—saying that Amazon had created a fine device but that “Apple was going to stand on their shoulders and go a little further.”
Technically, one navigated an iPad the same way as an iPhone, but the difference in user expectations was vast. Jobs and others involved in the unveiling, such as iPhone/iPad boss Scott Forstall, hit this point over and over. Cell phones were always designed to fit in a pocket and be navigated with fingers. But navigating something like the iPad with a screen the size of a laptop’s had always required either a stylus or a trackpad/mouse and a keyboard. “If you see something, you just reach out and tap it. It’s completely natural. You don’t even think about it. You just … do,” Forstall said.
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The immediate reaction to the iPad was full of oohs and aahs. The Economist famously put a picture on its cover of Jobs in religious garb holding the device. THE BOOK OF JOBS. HOPE, HYPE AND APPLE’S iPAD said the headline. But the reaction to it in the days and months thereafter was, remarkably, tepid. There were widespread gripes about the iPad’s lack of a camera, its lack of multitasking, and the images of feminine protection some said its name conjured.
The biggest criticism, however, was the one Jobs thought he had answered in his presentation: What do I need it for? It looked like an iPhone, only four times bigger. Competitors such as Schmidt, amid his standard “I won’t comment on a competitor’s products,” said snidely, “You might want to tell me the difference between a large phone and a tablet.” Gates said, “I still think some mixture of voice, the pen, and a real keyboard will be the mainstream. It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’” He said he had felt that way with the iPhone. It wasn’t just competitors who trashed the iPad. Business Insider, a well-read online news site, ran a commentary that said, “Apple’s iPad Is This Decade’s Newton.” MacRumors, another well-read online news site, pointed out that the iPad TV commercials bore a striking resemblance to those for the Newton in 1994.
With so much at stake in his battle with Google, Jobs was furious at the initial reception the iPad got. The night after the presentation he told Isaacson, “I got about eight hundred email messages in the last twenty-four hours. Most of them are complaining. There’s no USB cord. There’s no this or no that. Some of them are like ‘Fuck you.’ How can you do that? I usually don’t write people back, but I replied, ‘Your parents would be so proud of how you turned out.’ And some don’t like the iPad name and on and on. I kind of got depressed today. It knocks you back a bit.”
But the skeptical public reaction had a simple explanation. No one had ever seen a device like the iPad before, and the first ones would not go on sale for two months. Consumers knew instinctively that they needed a phone and a laptop because they had been around for a long time. The only tablets they had ever seen were devices they didn’t want. Even those who worked on the iPad at Apple were dubious about it at first. “I remember when I first saw it, I thought it was a rock fetch [a pointless endeavor], to tell the truth,” said Jeremy Wyld, an Apple engineer who worked on the software for it and the iPhone. “I thought, ‘This thing is ridiculous.’” Wyld wasn’t just shooting his mouth off. He was one of the earliest engineers on the Newton in the 1990s, before leaving Apple for engineering jobs at Excite and Pixo. When he looked at the first iPad, all he saw was a bigger iPhone that now no longer fit in your pocket. “I saw that when we made things bigger, people didn’t like it.”
When Wyld played with one of the prototypes, the experience instantly changed his mind, however. “They gave me one to play with, and I started checking email or something … and right then I said, ‘Now I get it. I am sick and tired of looking at a laptop to read my email in the morning. This is so much more personable than a laptop. A laptop is very cold. You get this much warmer feeling working with email on an iPad with your cup of coffee.’”
What Wyld discovered was that while the iPad looks like an overgrown iPhone because it runs the same software and has a touchscreen, it was really a new kind of laptop. You�
�d never give up a smartphone to own an iPad, but you would certainly dump your laptop to own one. That it looked like a large iPhone was initially something to be criticized. It turned out that the bigger screen, as simple a tweak as this was, was exactly what made it such a new and powerful device.
The importance of screen size seemed so obvious to Joe Hewitt—who had written the Facebook iPhone app in 2007 and had helped conceive and build the Firefox Internet browser in 2002—that the day after the iPad’s unveiling he wrote a nine-hundred-word blog post saying the iPad was the most important thing Apple had ever done. The year before, Hewitt had been fiercely critical of Apple for its restrictive app store policies. But his years of developing software for many different devices and platforms told him that the iPad had solved a fundamental problem.
“I spent a year and a half attempting to reduce a massive, complex social-networking website into a handheld, touchscreen form factor,” he said of the challenge of making Facebook work on the iPhone.
My goal was initially just to make a mobile companion for the Facebook.com mother ship. But once I got comfortable with the platform, I became convinced it was possible to create a version of Facebook that was actually better than the website! Of all the platforms I’ve developed on in my career, from the desktop to the web, the iPhone OS gave me the greatest sense of empowerment and had the highest ceiling for raising the art of UI design.
Except there was one thing keeping me from reaching that ceiling: the screen was too small … It needed to support more than one column of information at a time. I couldn’t fit enough tools on the screen to support any kind of advanced creative work. Photos were too small to show off to my farsighted parents. The web required too much panning and zooming to enjoy reading. Beyond just Facebook, most of the apps I used most on my iPhone also suffered from these limitations, like Google Reader, Instapaper, and all image, video, and text-editing tools. The bottom line is, many apps which were cute toys on iPhone can become full-featured power tools on the iPad, making you forget about their desktop/laptop predecessors. We just have to invent them.
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Unlike the iPhone, which got developed faster than it should have been, the iPad’s journey through Apple’s hardware, software, and design teams was long. Jobs told Isaacson that it started in 2002 at a birthday dinner for the spouse of a friend. The spouse was one of the engineers on Microsoft’s just-released tablet software, and he boasted about how the device was going to change the world. It angered Gates, who was there, because he worried the engineer was giving away company secrets. And it angered Jobs because he wasn’t about to let anyone from Microsoft show him up.
“This guy badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers and that Apple ought to license his Microsoft software,” Jobs told Isaacson. “But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as you have a stylus, you’re dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, ‘Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be.’”
The man Jobs turned to, Tim Bucher, was someone he’d known for years, but who’d just joined Apple the previous year to run Apple’s Macintosh hardware division. He had a reputation as a creative thinker and master tinkerer. He’d already run engineering for WebTV for three years and been the vice president in charge of consumer products at Microsoft after it bought WebTV in 1998. Before joining Apple he’d started his own successful online consumer storage company. He made an impression at Apple immediately. One day in a meeting with Jobs he pulled out a bunch of parts he’d been carrying around in a shopping bag and assembled a prototype of a Mac mini before Jobs’s eyes. He’d gotten chief designer Jony Ive to design the case and, using spare laptop parts, built the innards in his garage. He’d carried all this around with him for weeks until the right moment to show Jobs presented itself.
After Jobs told Bucher to investigate building a tablet, he quickly found himself buying dozens of Windows-based tablets made by various PC manufacturers and spending hours in Ive’s design studio with Ive and Jobs critiquing them. “His main mantra was ‘I want to read the newspaper,’ and he would always use the restroom as an example. He would never say, ‘I want to show Bill Gates.’ It was more, ‘This is a piece of shit. We can do so much better. Why did they do this? Why did they do that? Let’s make something completely different from the ground up.’”
Perversely, the work that seemed technically hardest—building the multitouch display that is now on every tablet and smartphone—got the furthest, while seemingly the most straightforward work—figuring out a way to build the rest of the device—quickly ran aground.
Part of what gave the multitouch work traction was that one of the engineers on the project, Josh Strickon, had built a crude multitouch display for his MIT master’s thesis. And by 2003 he had, with Steve Hotelling and Brian Huppi, who both are still at Apple, figured out a way to show off a much more refined version of the technology to Fadell. Visually it was messy looking. It used the screen of one of the tablet prototypes. But the chips that would tell the screen to respond to finger inputs sat on a separate two-by-two-foot circuit board that was hardwired to the screen. To power all that and give the gestures something to navigate, it all needed to be connected via USB cables to a powerful Mac Pro desktop computer. To enable all that to be seen by a crowd in a conference room, the Mac Pro had to be connected to a projector. The point of the demonstration was to position the multitouch team—known then only as the Q79 group—to get $2 million in Apple funding to turn the big circuit board into a single chip that could go inside a device.
The demo went well. They showed off the virtual keyboard and the pinch and spread features that are so strongly associated with the technology today and got Fadell’s approval. The problem was that the tablet hardware was unusable. The energy-efficient ARM processors that would eventually drive the iPhone and the iPad were not yet powerful enough to run software that would appeal to consumers. The tablet needed a hard drive, which took up too much room in the case because flash storage was still too expensive in the capacities they needed. What that left was a machine without a keyboard that was not much lighter, cheaper, or better powered than a laptop.
Jobs had hoped to show Gates that he could build a better tablet—one that didn’t need a stylus. But he discovered Gates’s problem had less to do with a lack of imagination and more to do with the idea’s being ahead of the technology necessary to make it a reality. “We had this idea for a device and we had the interface [multitouch] and all that, but there wasn’t a viable platform,” Strickon said. Indeed, it seemed so clear to him that the project would go nowhere that he left Apple for a mobile marketing start-up and then an engineering post at The New York Times. He wasn’t wrong. Apple shelved the project for a year before Jobs revived it to build the iPhone.
Only after the iPhone came out in 2007 did Jobs start to reconsider a tablet. Chief designer Jony Ive had been exploring netbook designs. He was stuck on how to build a machine that small with a keyboard hinge that was both good-looking and functional. According to Isaacson’s account, Ive asked Jobs if they could just do away with the hinge and put the keyboard on the screen as they had done with the iPhone, and quickly Jobs’s dalliance with netbooks turned into Apple’s tablet revival.
But it wasn’t until the fall of 2009—months before unveiling—that Apple settled on what kind of product the iPad would be. Apple was going to build a tablet no matter what. Jobs had been trying to build one since 2003, and he had been thinking about building one since the 1980s, according to videos of him then. Also, the technology was finally ready: there were finally enough bandwidth, powerful enough processors, and strong enough batteries to make a tablet useful. Multitouch had proved to be hugely popular in the iPhone, so the idea of using a virtual screen to write emails or type in web addresses was no longer foreign. And because Apple was
selling so many iPhones, it had driven the price of components for a tablet down to affordable levels.
The question that remained unanswered when Jobs returned to Apple from liver transplant surgery in the summer of 2009 was what kind of device the tablet would be. Would it be just an iPhone with a bigger screen or would it have its own set of apps that set it apart? Initially Jobs was leaning toward its being just a bigger iPhone. He thought of it purely as a consumption device, a confidant said. You wouldn’t be able to edit documents or spreadsheets on it. And he was leery of having it become an e-book reader like the Kindle, which had been out for nearly two years. He thought people were reading less and less anyway, and that those who still did read books would prefer the physical over the electronic versions.
Eddy Cue, Apple’s iTunes boss, and Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of global marketing, were among those who made it their mission to help Jobs clarify his point of view. Schiller pushed Jobs to modify his view of what a “consumption device” really meant. If someone sent a document or a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation, iPad users needed to be able to edit it. Cue, meanwhile, made it his mission to get Jobs to rethink his view about e-books. Amazon’s Kindle was getting much more traction than they expected. An estimated 1.5 million had been sold by mid-2009. And readers were downloading e-books at an astonishing rate.
Cue was keenly aware of the competitive threat this posed. For two years Apple had been increasingly competitive with iTunes in music, movie, and TV show downloads. If Apple passed entirely on selling e-books or e-magazines, that would give Amazon a huge competitive boost. “The fact is that if we didn’t have those book agreements, there would be a lot of people saying, ‘Oh, well, this is not a competitor to the Kindle.’ We needed the publishing agreements so people could legitimately say, ‘I can get something better than a Kindle if I buy an iPad,’” a Jobs confidant told me.
Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution Page 16