On 2 March 2011, Steve Jobs appeared on stage and proceeded to give Apple's competition in the tablet market a bit of a kicking. (One might also argue he smacked the PC market a few times: in referring to the iPad as a 'post-PC' device, it's pretty clear Apple thinks traditional computers aren't long for this world.) As we outlined , Apple's new iPad ticks all of the non-bonkers spec boxes that people were expecting and, broadly speaking, brings the iPad back to the cutting-edge of touchscreen tablets, obliterating any major tech lead the competition thought it had. Some of the more extreme rumours of course turned out to be hogwash. The device has no extra ports (such as USB or an SD-card slot), and there's no Retina display (although with the iPad 2's surprisingly rapid international rollout, the suggestion of an iPad 3 release date later in 2011 no longer looks so unlikely); however, when Steve Jobs argued that the tablet had received a "complete redesign", he wasn't kidding. Slimmer, flatter On the outside, the device is now a little more svelte, having lost a third of its thickness and a tiny amount of weight. Its back is flat, it comes in black or white, and the revised device boasts a front and back camera. The more technically inclined will be excited to hear that the iPad's innards now boast an A5 processor and hugely improved graphics performance; the doubling of CPU speed and massive boost to graphics (Apple claims up to "nine times faster") is Apple's latest shot across the bows of the videogames and creative industries. Apple isn't pitching the iPad 2 as a device to mess about with now and again, but as a fully fledged computing platform that, for many people, now has more than enough grunt to take over from a laptop
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