People really thought it was just a giant iPod Touch. Honestly, if you were around the tech blogs in early 2010, the "iPad" name was the butt of every joke. Critics called it a "Maxipads" disaster. They said nobody needed a "tweener" device. But then Steve Jobs sat in a comfy leather chair on stage, and everything changed.
The 1st ipad release date wasn't just a day on a calendar; it was the moment the "post-PC era" actually started. We’re talking about April 3, 2010. That was the Saturday morning when the Wi-Fi-only model officially hit the shelves in the United States.
The 1st ipad release date and those weird early months
Let’s get the timeline straight because it was actually a staggered rollout. Steve Jobs first pulled the device out of an envelope (metaphorically, he did that with the Air, but you get the vibe) on January 27, 2010, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
He pitched it as a "third category" of device. Better than a smartphone for browsing, better than a laptop for reading.
After that January announcement, the hype—and the skepticism—boiled for months. Pre-orders finally opened on March 12. If you wanted the 3G version? You had to wait even longer. While the Wi-Fi version landed on that famous 1st ipad release date of April 3, the Wi-Fi + 3G models didn't show up until April 30, 2010.
International fans had it even worse. Apple actually had to delay the global launch by a month because they couldn't keep up with the US demand. It didn't hit Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK until May 28, 2010.
Why the $499 price tag shocked everyone
Before the launch, rumors were flying that this thing would cost $1,000. When Jobs flashed "$499" on the screen behind him, the room went nuts.
- 16GB Wi-Fi: $499
- 32GB Wi-Fi: $599
- 64GB Wi-Fi: $699
- The 3G tax: You had to add $130 to any of those prices if you wanted cellular data.
It sounds cheap now, but back then, $500 for a screen that didn't even have a camera (yeah, remember that?) felt like a gamble. There was no front camera for FaceTime. No back camera for those awkward tourist photos we see now. Just a 9.7-inch slab of glass and aluminum.
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What most people get wrong about the hardware
We look at the M4 iPad Pros today and forget how "basic" the original was. It ran on the Apple A4 chip, which was Apple's first in-house silicon. It clocked in at 1GHz.
The RAM? A measly 256MB.
Basically, if you tried to open more than three tabs in Safari today on that hardware, it would probably just give up and restart.
The screen was a 1024 x 768 resolution at 132 pixels per inch. It wasn't "Retina." You could see the pixels if you looked close enough. But for 2010, it was gorgeous. It was the first time we had high-quality IPS displays in our laps.
One detail people always forget: the original iPad was heavy. It weighed 1.5 pounds. Hold that above your face while reading in bed for ten minutes and you’d definitely feel the burn. It was a chunk.
The "Netbook Killer" narrative
In 2010, everyone was obsessed with Netbooks. Those tiny, plastic, underpowered laptops that everyone hated but bought because they were $300.
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Jobs hated them. He called them "cheap laptops" that weren't good at anything.
The iPad was designed to kill the Netbook, and it basically did. Within 28 days of the 1st ipad release date, Apple had sold a million units. It took the iPhone 74 days to hit that same milestone. By the end of 2010, Apple had moved about 7.5 million iPads.
What it was actually like to use
It launched with iPhone OS 3.2. It didn't even have "iPadOS" yet. It was literally just a big phone interface.
You couldn't do multitasking. You couldn't have two apps open side-by-side. If you were writing an email and wanted to check a website, you had to close the email app, open Safari, then go back. It was tedious, but the "fluidity" of the touch interface made people overlook the limitations.
Lessons from the 2010 launch
Looking back, the iPad succeeded because it didn't try to be a computer. It tried to be an appliance.
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If you’re looking at your modern tablet today, here is how you can appreciate that 2010 legacy:
- Check your battery life: The original iPad promised 10 hours of video playback. Amazingly, Apple has stuck to that "10-hour" target for almost every iPad released since then.
- Look at your apps: The iPad launched with only about 1,000 native apps. Developers had to scramble to figure out what to do with all that extra screen real estate. This birthed the "HD" app era.
- Appreciate the "Home" button: That single physical button was the only way out of an app. No gestures. No swiping up. Just a click.
The 1st ipad release date proved that there was a middle ground between the phone in your pocket and the computer on your desk. It wasn't a "need" device; it was a "want" device that eventually became an industry standard.
If you still have one of these in a drawer, it’s likely stuck on iOS 5.1.1. It’s basically a digital picture frame or a very slow e-reader now, but it represents the last major "new" product category Steve Jobs personally introduced before he passed away.
To see how far things have come, compare those original 2010 specs to the latest iPad Air or Pro models. The jump from 256MB of RAM to 8GB or 16GB is a literal 60x increase in memory, proving just how much we underestimated what a "tablet" could eventually do.