February 8, 2010: Steve Jobs shocks a Wall Street Journal editor into deleting the first-ever tweet sent from an unreleased iPad.
The WSJ‘s deputy managing editor, Alan Murray, had tweeted "This tweet sent from an iPad. Does it look cool?" from a prerelease unit Jobs personally handed him during a private media demo in Manhattan. The iPad wouldn’t ship to customers for another two months.
Unfortunately for Murray, Jobs’s idea of a reasonable response was to make the tweet vanish entirely.
A tweet heard ’round Silicon Valley
The whole drama played out during a media blitz Jobs conducted through Manhattan’s biggest newsrooms. Apple wanted The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times on board to develop flashy launch apps for its new $499 tablet. Jobs personally showed off the iPad to top editors and journalists, pitching a future where the device would rescue struggling newspapers and magazines.
Murray couldn’t resist.
His tweet went live on February 4 and vanished shortly after. When Valleywag tracked Murray down for comment, the best he could muster was: "I would love to talk about this, but can’t." He later added: "I will say that Apple’s general paranoia about news coverage is truly extraordinary — but that’s not telling you anything you didn’t already know."
Something of an understatement, that.
Jobs was already on edge during these meetings. At a separate sit-down with New York Times staffers, he went off-message, telling the room he’d been flooded with hate mail from so-called Apple "fans" after the iPad announcement. "Really nasty stuff," he said, "things like ‘F**k you and your family.’"
And this was far more than just a case of one stressed-out CEO.
The secrecy obsession defined how Apple operated under Jobs. A week before Murray’s tweet, Stephen Colbert whipped a prerelease iPad out of his jacket on live TV during the Grammy Awards, reading nominees from the screen. "Jay-Z, did you not get one of these in your gift bag?" Colbert joked. "Am I cooler than you?" But Apple controlled that stunt carefully — handing Colbert the iPad backstage and snatching it right back the moment he walked off.
Murray’s tweet was not part of any plan.
The iPad critics get it wrong
Viewed from today’s vantage point, the fuss over a single tweet seems absurd. But it’s worth remembering just how uncertain the iPad’s future looked in February 2010. Pundits mocked it as "just a big iPod touch." Hours after the January unveiling, "iPad a disappointment" trended on Google. Newsweek piled on. Bloggers compiled lists of reasons not to buy one.
And then it shipped.
Apple sold 300,000 iPads on day one. Within 80 days, it hit 3 million units. The device didn’t just create the modern tablet market — it obliterated every competitor that tried to follow. The Motorola Xoom. The HP TouchPad. The BlackBerry PlayBook. Remember those? Yeah, we thought not.
Don’t get me wrong: the first iPad had real limitations. No camera. No multitasking. No Flash support — a decision Jobs defended with an open letter that publicly torched Adobe. But none of that mattered, because holding that 1.5-pound slab of glass and actually touching the internet felt like the future arriving ahead of schedule.
Apple’s tablet empire in 2026
These days, Apple shifts roughly 19.6 million iPads per quarter and commands nearly 45% of the global tablet market. And iPad revenue hit $8.6 billion in the most recent holiday quarter alone. The lineup stretches from a $349 entry-level model to M5-powered iPad Pro machines that rival many laptops.
As strange as it seems today, the company that panicked over a single journalist’s tweet is now the biggest tablet maker on the planet — selling more units every quarter than it did in the iPad’s entire first year. Apple still takes heat for Siri’s sluggish progress and the delayed rollout of Apple Intelligence features, but the iPad itself has become something of an unstoppable force in Cupertino’s product lineup.
Jobs never got to see most of this.
Do you remember the original iPad launch?
Were you one of the skeptics who dismissed it as a "big iPod touch"? Or did you line up on April 3, 2010, to get one? Leave your comments below.
