• WWDC sold-out in eight days.
• There is no IT track this year.
• There are fewer scheduled sessions for programming Mac OS X applications
• the iPad sold one million units in one month, the fastest-selling product Apple has ever had
• the only apps you can nominate for an Apple Design Award this year are iPad and iPhone apps.
• Apple has been having the most profitable quarters in decades, based mostly on iPhone and iPad sales

If you can’t see the direction that Apple is headed, then you haven’t been paying attention. Every year Apple becomes less of a computer manufacturer and more of a consumer electronics manufacturer. Macintosh computers will continue to be made for some time, but it’s clear that Apple’s primary focus is shifting to the iPhone and iPad market. And who can blame them? The profitability of the iTunes and App Store is immense. If Apple can get textbook publishers on-board, they’ll go on to capture yet another market as schools begin to see the benefits of electronic and interactive textbooks. If you haven’t seen some of the cool stuff being made for the iPad, take a look at these five excellent interactive storybooks currently released for the iPad.

The iPad is a game-changer. We’re on the first upswing of a true paradigm shift in how technology will be used by the majority of people in the world. Computers as we know them today will be around for a long time still, but it’s clear that the industry is changing. 44% of iPad buyers view the iPad as a replacement for a laptop. CTO’s of huge companies like EMC are discovering that their computer-using family members are flocking to the iPad and ignoring their laptops and desktops.

The iPad, of course, is not a perfect device. It’s very much a first-generation device, but it’s still revolutionary. Reading a traditional book with my 2.5-year-old son is sometimes an exercise in frustration as his attention span is that of a gnat. Last night, we read together the Jack and the Beanstalk interactive iPad book for 30 straight minutes with him fully engaged, interested and learning. I recently showed my iPad to the speech therapist who has been working with my son and she was simply blown away by some of the alphabet and numbers learning games that are available. The power of this technology combined the ingenuity of programmers writing some amazing software is going to change how many of our children learn in this country. The OS and hardware will continue to mature and we’ll start seeing some even more amazing applications surface.

Schools that are interested in technology integration in their curricula need to be evaluating the iPad and other tablets for use in their classrooms. Maybe not immediately, but it’s inevitable that these devices will become very important tools in how technology is used in schools. The growing number of 1:1 laptop programs will transition into 1:1 tablet environments. Across the country, clued-in IT Directors are watching and evaluating the rise of iPad computing. Ignoring or dismissing this trend would be a mistake.

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Apple didn’t design the iPad to be for us. It’s not a “Netbook without a keyboard.” It’s not meant to be a multitasking, primary-use computer. You’re not meant to write novels on it, or use InDesign to design a newspaper, or edit a movie in iMovie. The iPad isn’t for us; it’s for everyone else.

Apple has clearly spent a lot of time on the iPhone OS user interface to allow it to lower the barrier of entry to computing to practically nothing. I can hand my 2-year-old son my iPhone and he figures out how to navigate the controls immediately. My mother, who can barely manage to turn on her iMac to compose an email is able to use my iPhone with little guidance. The iPhone was the first step in moving away from the desktop paradigm of computer use; the iPad is a second step. It’s ironic that Steve Jobs and Apple, who did so much to create and popularize and spread the desktop metaphor of computer use, are the same people working to overturn that metaphor and move the public to a new way of interacting with computers.

In ten years, we won’t even recognize the computers that we’ll be using. My son will be 12 years old, and he won’t be using a laptop or a desktop computer, except in some specialized uses. Mac OS X and Windows as we know them will be distant and obsolete technologies to him. His computing environment, ten years from now, will be some distant generation of the iPad. Speech recognition and multi-touch variants will be the primary ways of interacting with his digital devices. Technology evolves and improves rapidly. What we’re seeing with the iPhone and now the iPad is nothing more than the next generation of computing devices. It’s going to be exciting to see it evolve.

The iPad also lends itself to a global audience. Apple has already figured out a better way for Chinese language characters to be entered, using the multi-touch trackpad on their newest laptops. This kind of data entry, using your fingers to draw characters rather than a keyboard, will of course be ported to the iPad. Just because the most efficient way of data entry for an Arabic character-based language is via a physical keyboard doesn’t mean that that is true for a large chunk of the rest of the world.

So you can titter and joke all you want about the name and how it conjures up images of feminine hygiene products. Apple doesn’t care. People laughed at the iPod name also and look how big of a failure that was. Eventually the iPad will gain some multitasking functionality in a future iPad OS version and it’ll be more palatable to the geeks. But until then, Apple will be selling millions of these things to average users who simply don’t know and don’t care about the “missing” features about which you are whinging.

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