Biography | Steve Jobs — He Sat on a Couch Here and Priced the Tablet at 499 Dollars

On 27 January 2010 Steve Jobs took the stage of the theater at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, at 700 Howard Street in San Francisco, and introduced a slab he called iPad.

The hall still runs dance and film most weeks.

That morning it held analysts, journalists, and a leather couch.

Jobs sat on the couch to buy movie tickets on Fandango and to show what a 9.7-inch Multi-Touch screen looked like in a lap rather than a hand.

The Wi-Fi model was half an inch thick and weighed 1.5 pounds.

Storage came in 16, 32, and 64 gigabytes at $499, $599, and $699.

A 3G version, using AT&T in the United States, was listed at $629 and up and was promised for April.

Wi-Fi units were scheduled for late March.

The processor was Apple's own 1 GHz A4 chip.

Battery life was given as ten hours of use and a month of standby.

It was not the first tablet computer.

Microsoft, GRiD, and a decade of slate PCs had already failed to convince people to buy a third screen.

What Jobs argued in this room was that the third category sat between a phone and a laptop, and that the price had to start under $500 or the category would stay a demo.

The theater, designed by James Stewart Polshek and Todd Schliemann and opened in 1993, is now billed as the Blue Shield of California Theater at YBCA.

The galleries next door at 701 Mission Street are a separate building by Fumihiko Maki.

Apple kept returning to this stage for several autumn events, then stopped when it built a theater of its own in Cupertino.

Cover: Steve Jobs on this stage on the evening of 27 January 2010.

The second photograph is the theater dressed for the same morning.

Photos: matt buchanan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.