It’s been a long, strange journey from ‘Hey Siri’ day in San Francisco to now.
It’s not quite right to say that for the first five years of its life, the iPad was an iPhone (or an iPod Touch) with a really big screen meant to be a lean-back consumption device. After all, the very first iPad shipped with a productivity accessory in the form of the Keyboard Dock.
But ten years ago, Apple got serious. It shipped the very first iPad Pro, and began a decade-long conversation about whether the iPad could be used for work and even whether or not it was a computer.
Today, the M5 iPad Pro and iPadOS 26 have settled a lot of old scores. But it’s been a long, strange journey from “Hey Siri” day in San Francisco to now.A big screen and accessories
What made the original iPad Pro was its size and its collection of accessories. Though Apple would later add a smaller model, the first iPad Pro had a 12.9-inch diagonal screen, providing more space than ever before on an iOS device.
What can you do with all that space? Shortly before the iPad Pro shipped, Apple shipped iOS 9, which added iPad multitasking for the first time in the form of Slide Over and Split View. Yes, it would take a decade for Apple to toss that approach entirely away and start again with iPadOS 26, but the ability to run two iPad apps at once, on that big screen, was a big deal.
The other thing you can do with an iPad that’s bigger than ever before is attach a keyboard to it, and so Apple introduced the Smart Keyboard alongside the iPad Pro. By today’s standards, it was rudimentary–a thick multi-fold case with membrane keys and no trackpad. In fact, at the time, I felt that you’d be better off just using a case and a Bluetooth keyboard when you wanted to write on the iPad!
But the most important thing about the Smart Keyboard is that it existed. Its existence meant that Apple felt that toting around a keyboard and using an iPad as an almost-laptop was an endorsed use case. It mattered.
The other iPad Pro accessory introduced a decade ago was the Apple Pencil.
