Steve Jobs Introduces the iPad (2010)

Steve Jobs introduced the iPad in San Francisco on January 27, 2010, presenting it as a new category of device between the phone and the laptop. It started at $499, could run almost all of the App Store's 140,000-plus apps on day one, and arrived with a new iBookstore for reading. The lasting image is Jobs settling into an armchair on stage to browse the web, which made the case for a computer you hold rather than sit at. Tablets had been tried before; this is the launch that made the category stick, and the reason is visible here: it inherited a whole app library from the phone instead of starting empty.