Magical. The word has been used hundreds of times in Apple’s marketing to describe its products, but really took prominence with the introduction of the iPad. When Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the stage in early 2010 to introduce what we all knew at that point to be some sort of new tablet product, one of the first adjectives he used for it was ‘magical’.

Contrary to anecdotal wisdom, the term magical was actually only used 3 times in that iPad introduction, twice by Jobs and once by the iPad’s designer, Jony Ive, in a promo video. Yet the term resonated with people. How could something that was built almost completely on existing technology, was less powerful than almost any new laptop and was essentially a larger version of Apple’s own iPod touch, be magical?

To add to the flames, after the introduction of the iPad the term was suddenly everywhere. We had the Magic Mouse, the Magic Trackpad and a host of commercials sprinkled with a liberal dose of ‘magical’. The word was used as a rallying cry for critics saying that the iPad was nothing new and lampooned by parody commercials and advertising.

Magical success

The iPad is a resounding financial success, with sales in excess of 25 million units so far. By comparison the Motorola Xoom has sold, at best, around 125,000 units and, while 500,000 BlackBerry PlayBooks have been shipped, it’s unclear how many of those have been purchased by consumers. The interesting thing here isn’t the fact that the iPad is successful, it’s the reason why.

By all practical counts, the iPad should have made a medium-sized splash and settled into a slowly climbing slog towards the next generation device and the next after that. The specifications are relatively unimpressive, the processor is a dual-core 1 GHz chip, which is actually slightly worse than what the Xoom is packing. The Xoom even has more ram, a larger, higher-resolution screen and a better camera.

Instead, it managed to duplicate the hockey-stick shaped adoption curve of the iPhone and launch itself into prominence as the only truly successful modern tablet computer on the market.

Now, it’s clear that the iPad isn’t actually magical by the dictionary definition. It doesn’t fly or spontaneously generate fairy dust that cures all ills. Yet the adjective is used extensively in Apple’s descriptions and it makes a lot of people angry to see Apple ascribing such a distinctive descriptor to a product that they consider to be evolutionary at best. But most of those people are much more technologically savvy than the average iPad user.

To people that are familiar with the physical parts of the iPad and the OS that it runs, the iPad may seem like nothing but a combination of hardware and software that has existed prior, tucked into in a stylish new package. This is actually a valid viewpoint because that’s exactly what it is. There is definitely nothing magical to be found in the raw components that make up the iPad.

But the magic of the iPad isn’t the hardware, or the basic features of the software, which we have seen for years in the iPhone. Instead, it exists in the way that users interact with it.