Great piece by Rene Ritchie on the fifth anniversary of the iPad launch. He asked developers, analysts, and members of the press to share their first impressions of the device as they remember it. I liked this bit from Jason Snell regarding the original iPad’s hardware design:

Unlike all future iPads, that first one was truly chunky–it had sides, not just curved panels that connected the back to the front. But it truly did feel like a product that had fallen through a wormhole from the future, all screen and solid aluminum. By today’s standards, it’s already an antique after five years, but in the moment Apple’s strength in hardware design really shined.

Upgrading from the original iPad to the iPad Air 2, as I did, makes this point even more evident. The original iPad felt like a device from the future when it was first released because of its aluminum enclosure, glass screen, and powerful internals when compared to the smartphones available at the time.

But just five years later, the original iPad feels slow, heavy, and the non-retina display looks absolutely atrocious. For the time it felt revolutionary. But it didn’t take long for Apple’s iterative nature to leave the original iPad behind — doomed to a fate of spending it’s days in desk drawers with a dead battery, only to be used for nostalgic reasons