“Find its niche” is a little bit weak of a phrase to use, perhaps, but it does fir what I’m trying to get across – that the iPad is a product people don’t yet know they need. I give it a few months for developers to create some new apps that will make the device indispensable to the same people who hate on it 24/7. It’s niche will be a very large one – anyone who isn’t a techie or wants a content-consumption device for when they want a break from being one – but I still think it’s technically a niche device. It’s not something that will appeal universally.

People think that it was the interface that sold the iPhone. In reality it was the phone that sold the interface. Without the phone, the iPod Touch is just a niche device. (Remember the Newton?) Jobs was smart enough to realize that convergence was the Trojan Horse that would give the Apple revolution its next quantum leap of acceptance. And now that they have that bridgehead, Jobs is smart enough to realize that it’s multimedia that is the future. Funny how other people talk about that but – just as with phones – still manage to fail to realize what that actually means. Multimedia doesn’t mean a clunky device (eg: any laptop) that can do a lot of things separately and awkwardly. It means a single device that does media and the normal day-to-day activities of a wired world seamlessly and extremely well. I am by any definition a techie. I started programming using paper tape and toggle switches. I programmed for the Apple ][, bought the original Osborne I, used PCs since DOS 1.0, and can touch type 120 words a minute. But I don’t want to have to be a techie any more – and I don’t want to use a keyboard or a mouse the majority of the time. I want to relate to both the real and virtual worlds seamlessly. That’s the revolution – and that’s what the iPad lets us do.

As for specific features, again, people don’t understand the Apple philosophy: everything should be a black box, and what ties those black boxes together is both a unified user experience and a unified control center called iTunes. (Talking about names – notice how stupid that sounds now that it has grown so far beyond music? Think anybody cares? It’s become a brand.) Both smart design and smart marketing. They also make sure to leave plenty of space for developers to target submarkets that actually do want some of those features – whether in software or hardware.

Finally – Flash. Doesn’t anybody realize that Flash is obsolete? It was designed when (relatively speaking) bandwidth was at a premium while local processing power was plentiful. Today (again relatively speaking) the situation is reversed – and it will only continue to improve on the side of bandwidth. (There is an inverse relation between processing power and bandwidth: the more bandwidth you have, the less local processing you need.) Plus Flash is a proprietary technology that Apple doesn’t control. In a high-bandwidth world, HTML 5 can do everything that Flash can do – better – and as a universal standard. This is about Apple ensuring that it and it alone controls its own destiny – and if that means changing the established order – then the order is going to change.