On TechRadar, Gary Marshall asks the question “Why can no-one make an iPad killer?” His argument hinges, rightly, on the fact that most companies are looking at the wrong things.

What makes the iPad special isn’t the hardware. It’s the software.

This is key. It’s the reason Fraser Speirs has a school that arms every pupil with an iPad rather than a competing device. While everyone’s rattling off lists of specs, Apple’s continuing to enhance the user experience of its devices and ensure developers have a reasonably good means of getting product out there, meaning users have a ton of stuff to actually do with their devices. (There are shortcomings and problems, obviously, but the App Store is so far ahead of the competition that it’s almost painful. It’s telling that most of the top-selling apps on Android are admin tools, whereas on iOS they’re games, entertainment apps and productivity tools.)

However, the most important point in Marshall’s piece is this:

Apple has spent years thinking about what tablets should do, and it’s built an operating system from scratch to make the tablet experience as pleasant as possible.

Relatively few people realise the iPad came first. The device started life as a skunkworks project called SafariPad, but Apple didn’t see a market for it at that point, and so they shrank the form factor and created the iPhone. Crucially, no-one else did the same—instead, they ripped off the iPhone. The net result is we now have Android unable to scale, because it wasn’t designed to, but iOS happily works across a range of devices (including the new Apple TV).

Of course, other tablets will sell well, and others in the market will catch up (at least to some extent) next year; but until other companies sit down and design from scratch, considering the user experience key, their products won’t hold a candle to Apple’s.