Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad on 27 January 2010, and the anticipation had been running so hot that disappointment was almost the default reaction — one count put the device at more than 25,000 mentions in online articles in the first weeks of that year alone, before anyone had touched it. It had been talked about as the rescue of print, of publishing, of more or less any media business in trouble. A device was never going to do that, and casting Apple as a white knight was the wrong reading of what the company was good at, which was marrying form and function around the experience of using the thing. The iPhone had already shown that a device could work as a platform for something new rather than as a smaller version of something old.
The risk for journalism sat in the obvious response. Treating the screen as one more surface for displaying print recycles the conventions of one medium into another, and dropping a video beside a text story is not a reimagining of either. Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian, handling one shortly after the announcement, identified the puzzle as working out what the iPad was for, since the answer appeared to be everything. That vagueness was simultaneously the weakness and the point: a general-purpose surface leaves each person to make it specific.
It was, in any case, a first iteration, and the argument closed on the likelihood that its long-term effect on personal computing and on how people deal with media would end up underestimated.