Comment by rchaud

Comment by rchaud 21 hours ago

The iPad wasn't positioned to be a productivity device though. The $499 price was a surprise, but only because all the online chatter was guessing $999. It was at best a Kindle/Youtube/Netflix device. The marketing for iPad these days reflects this, the ads explicitly say "not a computer".

Tablet computers at that time ran full Windows, came with a keyboard and had pen support which the iPad didn't for many years. In fact iOS didn't even have a file manager until 2017, or mouse support until 2019.

pavlov 18 hours ago

The relationship the iPad had with tablets already in the market was basically the same as the PalmPilot vs. existing PDAs in 1997.

There was the big expensive Newton, and chunky Windows CE devices with keyboards that looked like micro-laptops. The Palm initially felt more like a toy compared to them, and it never got all the features of the Newton for example.

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Daub 15 hours ago

Hawkins was very adamant on holding back feature creep. Prior to developing the Palm Pilot he worked on the GridPad. One of the reasons that did not achieve its potential was that too many people wanted a say in defining its capabilities, leading to massive feature creep.

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