Happy Birthday, iPad: How Steve Jobs changed my life and business 10 years ago with a new device
January 27, 2010, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco: Steve Jobs steps onto an empty stage featuring just a Corbusier armchair and a coffee table its center. By now at the latest, the news was obvious, the rumors were confirmed: Jobs will soon be lounging in this Swiss design classic and will present his mobile “lean-back medium” — the tablet. But how will he call this device: iTablet? iSlate? iPad?
After some business updates at the beginning of his presentation Jobs unveiled with a touch of pathos the device that he called the iPad.
From the first moment, I was thrilled. For many people the iPhone may have been the biggest technological game-changer in their personal or professional lives, for me it was the iPad: the new device had the size of a magazine in tabloid format, it combined text, video, images and interaction, all accessible with touch gestures: 1024 × 768 pixels as a playground for digital storytelling.
New Storytelling Formats
For my team and me, the iPad was definitely the biggest source of inspiration in the last decade — in the spirit of John Lasseter who once said that technology is a source of inspiration:
“Art challenges the technology, and the technology inspires the art” (John Lasseter, co-founder of Pixar)
Personally, this device turned me from a classic documentary film producer into a digital storyteller (or whatever you want to call what I’m doing now). It paved the way for me to merge documentary film with eBooks, to combine video, text and images into engaging facts. The result was a format we called “Videobook”. Here is an example:
The disillusionment
We weren’t the only ones, who were inspired by the iPad: Al Gore’s “Our Choice” for instance set new standards for interactive books. Magazine publishers like Condé Nast invested millions in iPad apps. The iPad established itself on the market faster than the iPhone at the time. But the iPad — or rather the content developed for the iPad — was a disappointment, it did not become the salvation for content producers and publishers: most magazines soon dropped their iPad apps, laid off entire teams of digital designers, and the people behind “Our Choice” sold their technology to Facebook. With the sale to the tech giant, the creativity behind the technology also disappeared.
Awards but little business
We for our part were awarded for our videobook format “Best of App Store 2014” by Apple and won twice the German eBook Award at the Frankfurt Book Fair — but a real business model based on the sale of such content could not be developed back then. The problem wasn’t the content itself, but the app ecosystem, I believe. But more about that in a later article.
From a content consumption to a content creation device
The iPad did not become a revolution for the masses, but for me personally it is still the biggest spark that ignited a creative fire in me: For a while, I abandoned the production of documentary films and fully concentrated on the content behind this new device.
It is probably like with every innovation. The iPhone fell on highly flammable grounds and quickly became a wildfire. Other innovations fall on different ground and need an additional innovative breeze to get the fire started.
In the case of the iPad, it was certainly the latter — no wildfire, but certainly not just a spark that that was choked instantly. The device has grown up over the last ten years and has developed from a pure consumer device — also thanks to the Apple Pencil — into a content creation device.
Still a source for inspiration
That’s why it still inspires me every day or keeps the inspiration going. I can generate my own content, sketch, annotate text, make mind maps, all in this device. And as a consumer device, I am still fascinated by the possibilities that interactivity offers thanks to multi-touch.
Still, a young companion, full of potential and with each year of his existence the iPad will certainly keep on inspiring many of us to make digital content more lively and interactive.
🎉🥂Happy birthday, dear iPad!
