The development of the iPad tablet was probably one of the most important projects done by Jobs throughout his career at Apple and in the authorized biography released yesterday we have some information about this process. Of course, the tablet was designed in Jony Ive's studio, the location where every Apple product is born, and for the beginning, various prototypes of various sizes were built, all of which were tested by Jobs. In the end, the version with a 9.7-inch screen and 4:3 ratio was chosen, but there is a chance that tablets with smaller screens were designed by Apple and there is a chance that such a model will be released in the future.
The process began with Jobs and I've figured out the right screen size. They had twenty models — all rounded rectangles, of course — in slightly varying sizes and aspect ratios. I've laid them out on a table in the design studio, and in the afternoon they would live the velvet cloth hiding them and play with them. That's how we nailed what the screen size was," Ive said
No less than 20 tablets of different sizes were available for the testing process and choosing the right one involved hiding the products and testing them without the people involved knowing too much about them. Jony Ive claims that this is how he managed to choose the perfect model with a 9.7-inch screen that proved to be extremely popular among users. For this tablet, Steve Jobs wanted to use an Intel Atom processor, but he was convinced by Tony Fadell, one of Apple's vice presidents, that ARM processors must be implemented. Fadell went to the point where he threatened Jobs with his resignation from Apple and in the end the decision they made was the right one.
If an iPad tablet with an Intel processor had been released, then we probably would have had a little more performance but much less autonomy, an exchange that no one would have wanted.
