HP TouchPad

» see hp.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the touchpad was hp's first and only consumer tablet running webOS, the operating system inherited from the $1.2 billion palm acquisition in 2010. the device shipped on july 1, 2011 with a 9.7-inch screen and a $499 starting price that put it within ten dollars of the ipad 2. the launch reviews were lukewarm. the os was clean and the card-based multitasking was widely admired, but the apps were not there and the response time was uneven. the price had no oxygen against the ipad.

49 days later, on august 18, 2011, hp ceo léo apotheker announced that the company would discontinue all webOS hardware and explore spinning off the entire pc business. the touchpad died in the same press release that killed hp's consumer-hardware ambitions. the next day hp slashed the touchpad price to $99 for the 16gb model and $149 for the 32gb. that weekend the inventory disappeared. brick-and-mortar retailers sold out within hours on saturday morning. the online queue at hp.com collapsed. people who had never wanted a tablet bought two.

the fire sale itself became more famous than the product. there is a small but persistent webOS modding community that traces back to people who bought a touchpad at $99 just to flash android on it. hp eventually open-sourced webOS and sold the codebase to lg in 2013. the os ended up powering smart fridges and tvs, which is where it lives today.

by 2011 i was a working engineer in turkey already a few years past my msn-and-ttnet phase. i was on android phones at that point and the ipad was the obvious tablet if you wanted one. the touchpad never showed up in turkish retail at the $99 price, the fire sale was a us / canada / uk event. i watched it on engadget like everyone else and felt the specific mix of relief and envy that came with not being inside the geographic radius of a clearance sale.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it actually ended ~

léo apotheker had taken over as hp ceo in november 2010 with a software-services strategic vision and no obvious tolerance for hardware failure. when the touchpad's first six weeks of sales came in below internal targets, the executive response was not to push harder on the product or rebuild the os around developer momentum. it was to kill the entire consumer-hardware line in one announcement. apotheker himself was fired five weeks later, on september 22, 2011. meg whitman replaced him and reversed the pc-spinoff plan, but the touchpad was already gone.

~ the long tail ~

the $99 fire-sale weekend created a small phenomenon. forums filled with bargain-hunting threads, then with android-port threads (cyanogenmod for touchpad shipped within months), then with "what to do with my touchpad" threads. the device became a kind of stress toy for hardware modders. webOS itself got open-sourced as Open webOS in 2012 and then sold to lg, which still ships it on smart tvs today. so the os outlived the hardware by more than a decade, just on a different screen.

~ what it was actually about ~

the touchpad was not a bad tablet. it was a fine tablet shipped at the wrong price into a market that already had a clear winner. the failure was not engineering, it was that hp paid $1.2 billion for palm to get into a category where they had no software gravity and no app developer relationships. apotheker's decision to bail looks brutal in hindsight but it was honest. the touchpad was not going to outlast the ipad even with another year of patience.

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