1. Meet the iPad and the iPad mini

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 ...

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