NEW YORK: The iPad from Apple has turned 5 years old and it is still the most demanding iPad in the market. At present Apple has sold over 200 million units of iPad and also leading the market with 60 percent of share.
In an effort to celebrate the launch, we thought it might be fun to take another look at the original iPad, in addition to the latest model, the iPad Air 2, to see just how far the iPad has come in five years.
The original iPad with Wi-Fi launched on April 3, 2010, shortly before the 3G model hit a few weeks later on April 30. It packed just 256MB of RAM, a Cortex A8 processor clocked at 1GHz, a 9.7-inch 1024 x 768-pixel display, didn’t have any cameras to speak of and was a half of an inch thick.
The iPad Air 2, by comparison, packs a much sharper 2048 x 1536-pixel display, an A8X chip, 2GB of RAM (8x that of the original iPad), an 8-megapixel camera, a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera, support for the latest Wi-Fi and LTE networks, a fingerprint reader, up to 128GB of storage and, of course, iOS 8 which offers much more than the original software on the first iPad, putting all of that hardware to good use. Even more impressive – the iPad Air 2 is half as thick as the first iPad, measuring in at 0.24-inches thick.
The original iPad, once dismissed by some critics as merely a larger iPhone, eventually wound up in classrooms and businesses around the world, serving not only as a media machine but a full-fledged computer. It kicked off a revolution in the industry, too, and consumers now have choices from hundreds of Android and Windows tablets. We can go back and forth on what the best tablet is today, but there’s no dismissing that the iPad started something incredibly special that resulted in more choice for everyone.
While sales of the iPad have slumped during recent quarters, Apple is expected to eventually release its rumored iPad Pro, which may usher in a new age of iOS tablets, perhaps with a deeper focus on productivity and multitasking, and with the largest display on an iPad to date.
