Jony Ive, Senior VP, Design: You know, it’s true, when something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical. And that’s exactly what the iPad is.
It’s hard to see how something so simple, so thin and so light could possibly be so capable.
Phil Schiller, Senior VP, Worldwide Product Marketing: The iPhone was a revolution, and we learned so much from it and developed so many amazing technologies and all the applications, the multi-touch user interface. It was truly an incredible breakthrough product. We wanted to take all of that and apply that to a whole new class of product. The iPad is the best web surfing experience, the best e-mail experience, the best photo and movie watching experience. It’s going to change the way we do the things we do every day.
Jony Ive, Senior VP, Design: The face of the product is pretty much defined by a single piece of multitouch glass, and that’s it. There is no pointing device. There isn’t even a single orientation; there’s no up, there’s no down, there’s no right or wrong way of holding it. I don’t have to change myself to fit the product; it fits me.
Scott Forstall, Senior VP, iPhone Software: We looked at the device and we decided, let’s redesign it all. Let’s redesign, reimagine and rebuild every single app from the ground up, specifically for the iPad. And with this large a display you get apps that aren’t just a little bit better than their smaller counterparts. You get apps that are order of magnitude more powerful! iPad is the best way to browse the web. For the same reasons that it just feels right to hold a book or a magazine or a newspaper in your hands as you read them, it just feels right to hold the Internet in your hands as you search it. And with a screen this large, you can just see more of the web as you’re surfing it. Take the New York Times. You can see all the top stories. They are all just right there. If you see something, you just reach out and tap it. It’s completely natural. You don’t even think about it. You just do.
iPad is a world class e-mail client that’s incredibly fun but very productive. You can go through huge quantities of e-mail really quickly, and it’s fun because you’re doing it all with your hands. When you want to compose a new message, the keyboard automatically slides up from the bottom. And this keyboard is practically the same size as a laptop’s keyboard. If you want to focus on a single message, just rotate to portrait and everything else gets out of the way so you can concentrate on the content you care about.
iPad is absolutely the best way to view and share your photos. You see every one of your albums there, as just a stack of photos, and you can just pinch open to peek in a stack, or just pinch it open and look at all your photos. If you want to share with a friend, you can just flip over the iPad, and the iPad automatically flips the photo to the correct orientation.
This is an unbelievable device for watching video. The user interface we built for this is just fun. When you see something, you touch it with your finger and it starts playing. There is no delay. The quality of this video is amazing. You can double tap, fill the whole screen. We also built an incredible map application on here. It’s really fast. And we created a calendar application like nothing you’ve ever seen on a computer before. Another app we’re really excited about is called iBooks. When you couple books with a hi-res color display, reading an e-book is just such a pleasure. Not only can you read books on it, but the UI actually flips over to reveal a bookstore behind it. And with a tap of your finger, you can purchase and download a book and immediately start reading it. So now we have three phenomenal stores on the iPad: The iTunes store, the App Store, and now the iBook store. We built the iPad to run virtually every one of the more than 140,000 apps available in the App Store as well as the ones you’ve already downloaded on your iPhone. So the apps you use every day and all the games you love playing are right on your iPad right out of the box. Plus, with the release of the iPad SDK, developers will be building apps specifically for the iPad. So there’s going to be a whole new gold rush for app developers.
Bob Mansfield, Senior VP, Hardware: The iPad is the most advanced piece of technology that I’ve ever worked on at Apple.
The innovation of the product really starts with multitouch itself. This multitouch is the largest that we’ve ever built in a product. And it’s on multitouch of this size that you really feel the power and performance that multitouch can offer.
By putting well over 1,000 sensors in this multitouch design, the level of multitouch accuracy that the customer will experience is unprecedented. When you take the product out of the box and hit the power button, the display immediately comes to life. And I think our customers’ experience with that will be, Wow, this is a really vibrant display. The back lighting system is LED, and LED is what gives you the crispness and color quality in the display itself. Beyond that we use IPS technology. IPS is a premium display technology that gives you not only a great experience looking directly at the device, but also off angle, when you’re sharing the device with someone else.
The reason why this product responds so well and you really feel the performance of it is because of the custom silicon that we designed for this product. That silicon is called A4, and it’s really built by our hardware team in concert with our software team. What that gives you is a level of performance that you can’t achieve any other way. It also gives you the efficiency to achieve a battery that lasts all day long. Apple’s the one place that you can really do this. We build battery technology, we build chip technology, we build software, and we bring all those things together in a way that no one else can do it.
Phil Schiller, Senior VP, Worldwide Product Marketing: One of the most important features we designed in the iPad was an affordable price. Usually when you get the brand-new latest technology it starts at a high price, and over time it gets more affordable, works its way down. We wanted to do it differently. We wanted to take all this advanced technology of hardware and software, do everything we could to get it into the hands of as many people as possible right from the start. The iPad starts at just 499. That’s really exciting.
Jony Ive, Senior VP, Design:The iPad on one hand is clearly way bigger than just a new product. This is a new category. But yet, millions and millions of people are going to be instantly familiar with it; they’re going to know how to use it. In many ways this defines our vision, our sense of what’s next.
