1. Meet the iPad 2

It’s not often that something really new appears. Desktop and laptop computers are so commonplace, it’s hard to believe that not too long ago you could go to the airport and see maybe one or two personal computers, total. The iPhone represented a new direction for Apple—and, it turns out, the cell phone industry—but it was still just a smartphone executed really well. (What’s interesting is that the iPad actually came first: Apple took the work it put into developing a tablet operating system and decided to bring it to market first as a phone.)

Companies—Apple included—had tried to create tablet computers for years and failed. So what makes the iPad different? The iPad isn’t the same old desktop software pressed into a laptop case that’s missing a keyboard. It was designed from scratch to be a mobile tablet. And as you’ll see when you use it and as you read this book, that’s a profound difference. It’s not a laptop replacement (although it takes that role for some people), and it’s not a limited handheld device, either. The iPad shares the same underlying operating system as the iPhone, so many aspects may be familiar if you already own an iPhone or iPod touch, but it doesn’t rely on old computing crutches like using a mouse pointer or forcing the user to wrangle a sprawling file system.