In praise of tablets

Please don’t think of this as shilling for the Star’s tablet version, Star Touch — now available in Android as well as iOS. If you don’t like the Star, you’ll probably dislike it in any version. But I’ve been intrigued by the concept of tablets since Steve Jobs introduced the iPad in 2010, calling it the most important thing he’d ever done. That claim rattled around in my head for years. It sounded like promotion, but also sounded like he meant it. Yet he’d already put out the iPhone. If he meant it, in what sense?
Here’s a guess. The tablet marks a definitive break with the world of work. In their primeval origins, the devices Jobs and others created were tethered to work and its products, above all: to the typewriter. They had keyboards you tapped, and out came a thing, on paper, even if it emerged via a printer. There was no connectivity, how could there be? There was no Internet! Yet it’s as if Jobs intuited some other purpose for these devices, and always hated those infernal keys. He longed to cut the cord with work, without knowing why.
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