Cast your mind back to the beginning of 2010. A certain groundbreaking product was about to change the world. “Still no one is certain what the hell this creation is actually going to be for,” wrote the technology journalist Charles Arthur, “nor even what it will be called.” The Telegraph’s then technology correspondent, Claudine Beaumont, called it the “so-called iTablet”. She was far from convinced. “People might not know what they’ll use the tablet for,” she wrote somewhat grudgingly, “but they know that they need one.”

 

She was right. By Christmas 2011, the iPad was already being described as a true “game-changer”.