Zoey's theonlinefacts.com

Now that iPad is with us, many people are wondering about its usefulness and how it will likely fit their mobile style. Macs obviously fill what is a practical and lasting need. General purpose computing for personal or work reasons–whether web browsing, email, spreadsheet calculations, word processing, managing media, buying online–is pervasive, and is a common daily activity for millions and millions of people. The iPhone, first and foremost, is a phone with sms cabability, but it is also a portable Internet computer and a gaming device. With the app store, you can make the iPhone and iPod touch what you want them to be. But ultimately, computers and phones have an obvious place in the market. A tablet style computer like the iPad on the other hand, has yet to define its role in the overall computing space – the direction that Apple is trying its best to lay out.

Do we need the iPad? To understand this and to answer this question, it will be helpful to understand the broad segmentation of people who will be the target market for the Apple iPad:

1. Apple’s 125 Million Customers
The existing niche for the iPad consists of several distinct groups of consumers. The first and most obvious is Apple’s existing customers. In announcing the iPad, Jobs made it very clear that this is a key market for the device. Apple has 125 million customers who have stored their credit cards with Apple, presumably for iTunes purchases. They know, understand, and are fine with one-click publishing via the iTunes Store no matter which device they buy from. It is important to remember that despite becoming far more price-competitive in recent years, Apple still plays in the high-end of the markets it addresses. It has no interest in low-cost, low-margin, high-volume products. It prefers higher cost, higher margin products that, while perhaps not scaling like some other companies, are significant businesses nonetheless. That means its 125 million customers either have higher amounts of discretionary income than ordinary consumers, or they simply choose to spend outside their limits for Apple products. The iPad isn’t necessarily as much about fulfilling an existing need as it is creating desire. Even in a challenging economy, people want Apple’s products. The iPhone is far from essential. I can get a cheaper smartphone or traditional mobile for far less and fulfill the need. The iPhone resonates so soundly with customers that they buy it even though it also means higher monthly costs for a data plan. If Apple only got one in ten of existing customers, or 12.5 million people, to buy an iPad in its first year or two, it’d have a success on its hands.

2. Retail Store Visitors Who Aren’t Yet Customers
We cannot underestimate the power of Apple’s retail presence to have a big infuence on iPad sales. Apple has 283 stores in 10 countries, and welcomed over 50 million visitors to those stores in the last fiscal quarter. Extrapolating a bit, Apple routinely pegs the number of customers in its retail store who are new to Mac at 50 percent. Granted, this includes many iPhone and iPod touch customers who are Windows users, so there is some overlap with the present customer base identified above. But if you subtract another half, you still have another 12.5 million customers, for a total of 25 million. Because the iPad is less about giving customer demands and more about creating desire, the retail stores play a key role in customer adoption. early reports from the people who used it in the demo area are very positive. The emotional appeal of the product when people can actually pick it up and use it for 5 or 10 minutes will be huge.

In conclusion, the brilliance of the design of the iPhone and iPod Touch–and a key contributor to their success–is the combination of incredibly simple, well-made hardware that doesn’t look like anything but a small rectangular thingamabob. Turn it on, however, and it can do some pretty unforeseen excitement. With the SDK and resulting app store, you can turn these devices into anything you want them to be. I know some people who use them almost exclusively as iPods, others as game consoles, others still as business communications tools. The big screen is a great new feature that comes with the iPad. But ultimately the software applications and consumers will drive its adoption.