According to Otellini, it would have made sense for the iPad to use Intel chips. The problem, he said, was that Apple and Intel couldn’t agree on price. Also, they disagreed on who would control the design. It was another example of Jobs’s desire, indeed compulsion, to control every aspect of a product, from the silicon to the flesh.
The Launch, January 2010
The usual excitement that Jobs was able to gin up for a product launch paled in comparison to the frenzy that built for the iPad unveiling on January 27, 2010, in San Francisco. The Economist put him on its cover robed, haloed, and holding what was dubbed “the Jesus Tablet.” The Wall Street Journal struck a similarly exalted note: “The last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.”
As if to underscore the historic nature of the launch, Jobs invited back many of the old-timers from his early Apple days. More poignantly, James Eason, who had performed his liver transplant the year before, and Jeffrey Norton, who had operated on his pancreas in 2004, were in the audience, sitting with his wife, his son, and Mona Simpson.
Jobs did his usual masterly job of putting a new device into context, as he had done for the iPhone three years earlier. This time he put up a screen that showed an iPhone and a laptop with a question mark in between. “The question is, is there room for something in the middle?” he asked. That “something” would have to be good at web browsing, email, photos, video, music, games, and ebooks. He drove a stake through the heart of the netbook concept. “Netbooks aren’t better at anything!” he said. The invited guests and employees cheered. “But we have something that is. We call it the iPad.”
To underscore the casual nature of the iPad, Jobs ambled over to a comfortable leather chair and side table (actually, given his taste, it was a Le Corbusier chair and an Eero Saarinen table) and scooped one up. “It’s so much more intimate than a laptop,” he enthused. He proceeded to surf to the New York Times website, send an email to Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller (“Wow, we really are announcing the iPad”), flip through a photo album, use a calendar, zoom in on the Eiffel Tower on Google Maps, watch some video clips (Star Trek and Pixar’s Up), show off the iBook shelf, and play a song (Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” which he had played at the iPhone launch). “Isn’t that awesome?” he asked.
With his final slide, Jobs emphasized one of the themes of his life, which was embodied by the iPad: a sign showing the corner of Technology Street and Liberal Arts Street. “The reason Apple can create products like the iPad is that we’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts,” he concluded. The iPad was the digital reincarnation of the Whole Earth Catalog, the place where creativity met tools for living.
For once, the initial reaction was not a Hallelujah Chorus. The iPad was not yet available (it would go on sale in April), and some who watched Jobs’s demo were not quite sure what it was. An iPhone on steroids? “I haven’t been this let down since Snooki hooked up with The Situation,” wrote Newsweek’s Daniel Lyons (who moonlighted as “The Fake Steve Jobs” in an online parody). Gizmodo ran a contributor’s piece headlined “Eight Things That Suck about the iPad” (no multitasking, no cameras, no Flash . . . ). Even the name came in for ridicule in the blogosphere, with snarky comments about feminine hygiene products and maxi pads. The hashtag “#iTampon” was the number-three trending topic on Twitter that day.
There was also the requisite dismissal from Bill Gates. “I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard—in other words a netbook—will be the mainstream,” he told Brent Schlender. “So, it’s not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with the iPhone where I say, ‘Oh my God, Microsoft didn’t aim high enough.’ 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 continued to insist that the Microsoft approach of using a stylus for input would prevail. “I’ve been predicting a tablet with a stylus for many years,” he told me. “I will eventually turn out to be right or be dead.”
The night after his announcement, Jobs was annoyed and depressed. As we gathered in his kitchen for dinner, he paced around the table calling up emails and web pages on his iPhone.
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, no that. Some of them are like, “Fuck you, how can you do that?” I don’t usually 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.
He did get one congratulatory call that day that he appreciated, from President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. But he noted at dinner that the president had not called him since taking office.
The public carping subsided when the iPad went on sale in April and people got their hands on it. Both Time and Newsweek put it on the cover. “The tough thing about writing about Apple products is that they come with a lot of hype wrapped around them,” Lev Grossman wrote in Time. “The other tough thing about writing about Apple products is that sometimes the hype is true.” His main reservation, a substantive one, was “that while it’s a lovely device for consuming content, it doesn’t do much to facilitate its creation.” Computers, especially the Macintosh, had become tools that allowed people to make music, videos, websites, and blogs, which could be posted for the world to see. “The iPad shifts the emphasis from creating content to merely absorbing and manipulating it. It mutes you, turns you back into a passive consumer of other people’s masterpieces.” It was a criticism Jobs took to heart. He set about making sure that the next version of the iPad would emphasize ways to facilitate artistic creation by the user.
Newsweek’s cover line was “What’s So Great about the iPad? Everything.” Daniel Lyons, who had zapped it with his “Snooki” comment at the launch, revised his opinion. “My first thought, as I watched Jobs run through his demo, was that it seemed like no big deal,” he wrote. “It’s a bigger version of the iPod Touch, right? Then I got a chance to use an iPad, and it hit me: I want one.” Lyons, like others, realized that this was Jobs’s pet project, and it embodied all that he stood for. “He has an uncanny ability to cook up gadgets that we didn’t know we needed, but then suddenly can’t live without,” he wrote. “A closed system may be the only way to deliver the kind of techno-Zen experience that Apple has become known for.”