It probably isn’t worth 3 posts on kuppurao.com. I am not that much of an Apple fanatic either, though I think they have pushed manufacturing and usability to new limits of engineering.

Whether iPad as a product is successful or not is irrelevant. But Apple has kicked off a new type of revolution, the impact of which will soon be seen.

  1. Today a desktop or a laptop user is a loosely defined target community. Think of why we use a computer. Everything Jobs mentions as “key things” (internet, email blah blah blah) define a very high percentage of why people have computers at home and is anyway, a big part of what we do at work. For such use, iPad takes away the need to worry about installations, licenses, software, maintenance, virus/malware, compatibility issues etc…This is amazing. Shortcomings exist, but hey, evolution has to begin somewhere.
  2. People doing hard-core industrial designing, complex office work and IT users (software development/testing/maintenance/support) will be reason why desktops and laptops as we know them today, will exist. Or at best, we can safely say the thin devices won’t help these people.
  3. But most importantly, this concept is about to change something else: voice carriers will bury their faces and die. iPad or successors of iPad will replace your mobile phones and you won’t be paying for voice-plans any more. You will pay for a data plan and that’s it. With multimedia networks taking over everything, it is high time carriers slow down or stop new investments on voice networks and use that money to upgrade the data networks instead.

Of course, thin devices will not be an Apple-only market. It will not only be an open market, but also probably take over desktop/laptops as the primary market.