Here’s who’ll use the iPad

To no-one’s great surprise, Apple unveiled the iPad yesterday. But one thing Steve Jobs didn’t elaborate on was precisely who will be buying iPads.

Seasoned Apple watchers will remember the launch of the Cube in 2000. Supposedly occupying a product niche between the low-end iMacs and the high-end Power Macs, the Cube failed to find a viable market. After a couple of years of lacklustre sales, the Cube was quietly dropped.

So will the iPad be another Cube? I don’t think so. Unlike the Cube, the iPad could tap into some existing markets already, either becoming the new platform of choice, or else rapidly expanding what has hitherto been only a very small market.

Let’s look at some of these.

Folks who read newspapers. Print newspapers in the US in particular are dying. Almost nothing their owners have done in terms of online features and sales seems to be able to slow that down. One problem is that people like to read their newspapers while commuting, in coffee shops, and in other situations where a desktop or even a notebook computer isn’t convenient.

The iPad would be a great alternative, having the portability of a cellphone but with a much larger screen, making reading a newspaper online altogether more enjoyable. Unlike existing electronic book readers — such as the Amazon Kindle — the iPad has a colour screen, making it much better suited to newspaper pages than those monochrome devices.

The key thing for newspaper publishers is that the computing horsepower of the iPad would also make it possible to generate income in various ways. For a start, online newspapers could be sold via subscriptions. Imagine subscribing to a newspaper via the AppleStore in the same way you subscribe to a podcast. Without the need for physical distribution, newspapers could lower their prices while remaining economically viable.

Folks who read electronic books. The market for electronic book readers is currently small but growing. The current market leaders are Amazon and Sony, but their offerings are monochrome units with, frankly, annoying interfaces. Because they lack colour, they’re really only suited to displaying text; in other words, novels rather than travel guides, how-to manuals, graphic novels, textbooks, or any of the other types of book where a combination of text and images is important.

While the Amazon and Sony units are much cheaper than the iPad, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would buy one now the iPad is out. The base model iPad may be twice the price of a Kindle, but it’s ten times better.

Medics and lawyers. Both medics and lawyers rely on computers a great deal. Anyone who’s visited a hospital or nursing home in recent years will have seen nurses dragging around laptops that contain things like patient information and medication instructions. Doctors have used handheld computers at least as far back as the Psion Organiser of the 1980s, a device that here in the UK was especially popular for storing information on things like drugs. With its colour screen, wireless connectivity, and compact size, the iPad would be a very useful and versatile platform for medics.

Lawyers access online resources all the time, most famously things like LexisNexis. By using these resources, lawyers can check points of law and so better advise their clients. Like medics, lawyers should find the iPad a very portable tool for accessing this type of information.

Travellers. One thing that strikes me every time I fly is how many people bring along their laptops for the sake of entertainment. I’m certainly one of those people, and will stock up on movies from the AppleStore before flying, as well as organising PDF-format books, games, and other things that will keep me amused while wasting hours at airports.

Given its size, the iPad should be a natural companion for seasoned travellers. Weighing about 1.5 pounds, it’s a good deal lighter than the 5.5-pound MacBook Pro. Wireless and cellphone connectivity gives the iPad access to things like e-mail and Facebook, precisely the sorts of text-based communication travellers like to use. The fact it lacks a proper keyboard isn’t a major problem here, since the messages being typed out tend to be short.

Where the iPad really scores is in its ability to display or run all kinds of things really well: movies, music, e-books, newspapers, PDFs, web pages, games, etc.

The future. For Apple, the key to the iPad’s success will be how imaginative third-party developers and web site authors can be. Apple needs to get newspaper publishers creating sites optimised for the iPad, and the AppleStore needs to start selling all the games, electronic books, and other goodies people will want to install on their iPad. But none of this should be too difficult. Apple managed it with the iPod, and managed it again with the iPhone.

To be fair, the iPad won’t be for everyone. A notebook computer remains a much better tool for professionals who need a proper keyboard and a larger screen. While kids will probably be imploring their parents to buy them an iPad, a plain vanilla iMac would surely be a better choice in terms of speed, storage and connectivity.

But while the iPad has the potentially to be another Cube, I don’t think it will be. There are enough people out there who want products of this type.