The Dark Stage
Steve Jobs walked out onto a darkened stage in San Francisco on January 27, 2010, and revealed a device he called the most important thing he had ever made. This was not a modest claim for a man who had already made the Macintosh, the iPod, and the iPhone. The product was the iPad. A slab of glass and aluminum that sat somewhere between a phone and a laptop, belonging fully to neither category, and therefore—this was the Jobs logic—belonging to a third category the world had been waiting for without knowing it was waiting.
The internet more or less collapsed in the ninety minutes that followed. Twitter went down. Forums froze. The live-blog trade was not yet mature enough to handle the concurrent load of everyone on earth following the same keynote. What came through in fragments was this: a ten-inch screen, up to ten hours of battery, a price starting at five hundred dollars, and an interface that was essentially a scaled-up iPhone. You could paint with your fingers. You could read magazines with one. The specific demo that seemed to land hardest was simply browsing the web while sitting in a chair—the suggestion that a computer could be a couch object, something held the way you’d hold a book.
Apple had always operated like a minor religion, and Jobs was its uncomfortable prophet—not quite a CEO, not quite a performer, something that didn’t have a clean word in corporate vocabulary. The product launches ran on a specific grammar: the long build, the casual aside, the "one more thing." By 2010 the anticipation machine was so well-oiled that whatever he revealed was going to be simultaneously the most important object ever made and a betrayal of everything the leaks had promised. The iPad managed to be both and neither. Watching the keynote video I felt the specific pleasure of watching someone who understood design—not just product design but the design of desire—doing their best work.
Jobs was gone eighteen months later. The iPad he launched that day became the template for a category that now sells hundreds of millions of units a year and has changed almost nothing about the fundamental problems of creative work while making a handful of things considerably more comfortable. You can watch ten hours of film on it. You can read. You can draw. Whether it’s rinsed clean without residue is a question I’m still not entirely sure about.