Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, key members of the original iPad team, on the early days of the project and their regrets about how the iPad has evolved
Ten years ago, Apple introduced one of the most influential products of the company's modern era: the iPad. Tweets: @bzamayo Tweets: Benjamin Mayo / @bzamayo : Cool interview with Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno on the iPad during their tenure. A noted ‘regret’ is letting the iPhone dominate resources and attention too much. https://www.inputmag.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This interview lands on the iPad's tenth birthday, two days after a widely-read [[a:950003|ten-year retrospective argued the device never became revolutionary because of inconsistent multitasking]]. Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, who built the original interface, supply the internal explanation for that verdict: Apple let the iPhone absorb the resources and attention the iPad needed. It echoes the pattern from the earlier oral histories of the iPhone's secretive development, where internal priority fights shaped which products got the best people.
The regret is also a lens on everything since: the iOS 11 iPad Pro review that found it fell short as a laptop replacement, the eventual iPadOS 16 multitasking redesign with resizable windows, and Apple executives still defending the iPad's place in the lineup years later.
First-order effects
- Chaudhri and Bongiorno put a named, internal cause behind the external criticism — the multitasking shortcomings documented at the ten-year mark trace to Apple's own iPhone-first resource allocation, not to a technical ceiling.
Second-order effects
- Apple's subsequent moves read as responses to exactly this deficit: the resizable-window multitasking in iPadOS 16 and the later windowing work Federighi described are Apple retrofitting the software sophistication the founders say was starved.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to a durable structural tension: the iPad lives between the iPhone and the Mac inside Apple's portfolio, and its identity — from 'laptop replacement' ambitions to the M4-era positioning as an 'AI PC' — keeps being renegotiated by whichever platform holds internal priority.
The trend: The iPad's first decade is a case study in how a company's platform hierarchy — here the iPhone's dominance for resources and attention — shapes which products get the software investment to fulfill their original ambition.