Apple's Target Market
Apologies if this has been brought up already, but I don't have the time nor incling to wade through roughly 100 comments.
It has been suggested that Apple's tablet will fail because businesses won't buy it, and consumers won't buy it. The reasoning seems to hinge on the - possibly accurate - view that a physical keyboard is needed to make the thing useable as an everyday computer.
Well, here's the thing. I don't believe the tablet is designed to replace people's existing computers, but rather to compliment them. Therefore, it only needs to do a sufficient subset of things well. All well and good you may say, but who's going to buy it? Consumers don't need a crippled laptop in their house (no Windows jokes please...), and businesses won't buy their staff two computers.
Ah, but there's another market that Apple already does quite well in: Education.
How many students out there do you think have Apple laptops? How many get frustrated at having to carry around their new computer and all their textbooks/notepads at college/university every day. An Apple tablet seems like the perfect solution. It is lighter and can function as a note-taking device (via a stylus, since we're all taught to use a pen when writing as opposed to our index finger).
This last point is *very* important in my view. The tablet must be able to act as a digital notepad. Think of the benefits to students: all their notes can be backed up (God help those who forget this!) and also can be searched. At revision time, imagine being able to locate that obscure note you scribbled down about Winston Churchill's mindset (for example) without having to scour every last crumpled piece of tatty paper that you can find in your filthy little flat.
Plus, what student wouldn't buy a device with the following features:
less than 1kg (2lbs in 'merkan); 10" touch screen; wireless; Web browser; mail client; music player; video player; photo viewer; iPhone-style games; handwriting recognition (including math stuff); editing/viewing/annotating support for PDFs, spreadsheets, presentations, etc; auto-syncing with regular Macs/PCs.
Only one thing though, and this is aimed at Apple itself: please don't make the syncronisation require iTunes....