Apple iPad turns 10: How it evolved over the years

Ten years ago, Apple revealed its first ever tablet iPad, which was likened to a giant iPod Touch in the beginning but continued on to build a new kind of computing category. After a decade of existence, the iPad has emerged as a possible laptop replacement that can do so much more.

On January 27, 2010, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the $499 iPad at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena center. It was a thin (at least by 2010 standards) and light-weight device with a capacitive multitouch display. The iPad ran on Apple’s custom A4 chip and promised 10 hours of battery life. Notably, the iPad did not come with a camera and didn’t support multitasking.

The iPad 2 came the next year in 2011 and it had the same wide bezel design as its predecessor. However, the new iPad was thinner and lighter but priced the same as the first-gen iPad, ranging from $499 to $829 for a model with 64 GB of storage and support for Wi-Fi and cellular. In 2012, Apple unveiled the iPad 3, which was called just the iPad. It featured a 9.7-inch Retina display with a resolution of 2048x1536 pixels. This year also saw the introduction of the iPad Mini. The “mini” moniker came with an 8-inch screen and full functionality of the iPad.

In 2013, Apple made the iPad more thinner and more lighter and named it the iPad Air that came along with the iPad Mini 2. While iPads typically ran on “X”-branded versions of Apple’s iPhone chips, the iPad Air, being an exception, featured an A7 processor-- the same as the iPhone 5S. 2014 saw the arrival of iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3.

In 2015, Apple launched the first ever iPad Pro with a screen size of 12.9-inch, weighing around the same as the original iPad. The device was made to work with the Smart Keyboard and an Apple stylus called Pencil that were priced for additional cost of $169 and $99 over the iPad Pro's cost of $799. Since then, Apple has been carrying the iPad, iPad Mini, iPad Air, and iPad Pro as part of its tablet offerings and keeps updating each device at regular intervals.