The irony of Bill Gates and the iPad: Misreading the winner, correctly seeing the tablet's future
Sixteen years ago, Bill Gates gave a cold reception to the emergence of the iPad. The Microsoft founder even said he found nothing in Apple’s new tablet that made him wish Microsoft had created it first.
The market took a different path. The latest data from research firm Omdia shows Apple still leads the global tablet market in the second quarter of 2026. Apple shipped 13.5 million iPads and controlled around 38 percent of the global market. Samsung was in second place with shipments of almost six million units. That dominance has persisted even though iPad shipments fell eight percent compared with the same period the previous year.
Those figures become even more interesting because the global tablet market is actually under pressure. Omdia, in a report released on Thursday, 6 August 2026, estimated global tablet shipments fell 10 percent year-on-year to around 36 million units in the second quarter of 2026.
A separate report from International Data Corporation (IDC) on Thursday, 13 August 2026, also recorded a sharp contraction. Using IDC’s calculations, global tablet shipments in the same period reached 33.6 million units, down 12.3 percent year-on-year and 5.2 percent compared with the previous quarter.
Amid the latest data, Gates’s comments about the iPad in 2010 become interesting to reread. Not only because his prediction about the iPad’s appeal proved out of step with market developments, but also because part of his view on how tablets would be used sounds familiar in 2026.
Apple introduced the first-generation iPad in San Francisco on Wednesday, 27 January 2010. Steve Jobs described the iPad at the time as a device that created and defined a new category. The cheapest model was priced from 499 US dollars. Apple also said the device could run almost all of the roughly 140,000 apps then available on the App Store.
About two weeks later, Gates gave his assessment. As reported by The Guardian on Friday, 12 February 2010, quoting Gates’s interview with journalist Brent Schlender from BNET, Gates said:
“It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’”
In essence, Gates called the iPad a good reading device, but saw nothing in it that made him wish Microsoft had been the company to create it.
Gates’s assessment was actually more nuanced than simply rejecting the touchscreen. In the same interview, he stressed that he believed in touch technology and digital reading. However, Gates predicted that a combination of voice, digital pen, and physical keyboard — something closer to a netbook — would become the mainstream form of computing.
There is one important detail that is often lost when Gates’s comments are quoted again: the iPad had not even gone on sale at that point.
Apple only released the Wi-Fi iPad to the American market on Saturday, 3 April 2010. That means Gates was assessing a concept and a product that had just been introduced, not commenting on a device that had already failed to win over consumers.
Another detail is also important. The first iPad did not entirely close the door on a physical keyboard. Since its announcement, Apple had already offered the iPad Keyboard Dock, an accessory with a traditional full-size keyboard. The fundamental difference was that Apple made the Multi-Touch screen the primary interface, while the keyboard was positioned as a complement. That is where Apple’s bet differed from Microsoft’s Tablet PC vision.
When the iPad finally reached stores on 3 April 2010, the consumer response was immediately visible. Apple announced that more than 300,000 iPads were sold in the United States on the first day. On the same day, users downloaded more than one million apps and more than 250,000 electronic books from the iBookstore.
Just 28 days after going on sale, the iPad passed one million units sold. For comparison, Apple needed 74 days to reach one million units sold for the first-generation iPhone.
Less than 60 days after its launch, iPad sales had surpassed two million units. At that point, the device that some had initially viewed as a product stuck between smartphones and laptops had demonstrated that a large market existed for the category.
Sixteen years later, Omdia data shows Apple still occupies the top position in the global tablet market. That fact makes Gates’s assessment that he saw nothing in the iPad that would make Microsoft need to feel it had missed an opportunity increasingly stark when read today.
However, concluding this history simply as a story of “Gates wrong, Jobs right” is also too simplistic.