Did you know: Apple created the iPad before the iPhone. The iPad is not a giant iPhone or iPod Touch like we thought it was. More accurately, the iPhone is a mini iPad. Apparently, Steve Jobs revealed this secret at the D8 Conference, according to Mashable’s Barb Dybwad:
Walt then asks him why he built that operating system on a phone first instead of a tablet. Jobs then drops a reveal: “I’ll tell you a secret. It started on a tablet first.” He had an idea of a multi-touch display you could type on, and six months later his team had a prototype display to show him. After handing it off to Apple user interface experts who “got the inertia rolling,” Jobs realized, “My god, we can build a phone out of this,” and shelved the tablet because at the time the phone was more important. “When we got our wind back and thought we could do something else, we took the tablet back off the shelf.” — Steve Jobs at D8 on Flash, iPad and the Post-PC Era
Crazy to think the iPad was conceptualized before the iPhone was even a thought. Despite occasional setbacks, Apple is great at keeping things quiet. To think, Microsoft was working on what they thought would be a revolutionary Surface, while Apple was quietly plotting the silver, small and sleek iPad.