Apple usher in the post PC device era

How are you enjoying the post-PC era? What, you didn’t know you were in it? Well you must have missed Steve Jobs’ keynote last night as he launched the iPad 2 (watch the video here on the Apple website). That’s right, tablets are taking over from PCs (and Macs as well, presumably) as the home computer of choice, and Apple is already so far ahead of the game that its competitors have been “flummoxed”.

While I have real doubts that we’re actually living in a post PC device era, Steve Jobs definitely has a point about the fact that the iPad has been a remarkable success. 15 million sales in 2010 isn’t bad for a device that nobody knew they needed when it launched. He’s also right that the competition has been left standing, but let’s not forget that Android, the real competitor to Apple in this market, has the might of Google behind it, and it will catch up fast. I think the odds will always be tipped in Apple’s favour however – as recent tablets like the Motorola Xoom and Samsung Galaxy Tab have shown, nobody else has the commercial clout to ship a tablet computer with the iPad 2’s high-end features at such a low price. In the tablet market the best product is actually one of the lowest priced – that’s crazy if you think about it! Also, Apple has the advantage that it makes both the software (iOS) and the hardware, so it can design them along parallel lines, so that everything “just works” - something that Android tablets will never be able to match.

But I’m straying from my point now. Are we really in a post-PC era? I’d say, not quite yet. I think Apple’s spin machine has got a little ahead of itself here – there are still plenty of things a PC can do that an iPad can’t. Obvious things like burn a CD, plug in a USB hard drive, or play a Flash animation (that’s a little joke, sorry) but also subtle things, like work at all. At the moment you can’t use an iPad unless you have a PC (or a Mac) to activate it and sync with, and you can’t back up your data without a Mac or PC. But I think Jobs’ comments show where Apple is headed, and what I think the iPad 3 will be all about. My prediction for iPad 3 will be that it will function as a stand-alone tablet for the first time. Backup and syncing will be done wirelessly to the cloud (via a revamped MobileMe – mention of which was suspiciously absent in Jobs’ keynote, despite expectations to the contrary), so you won’t ever need to connect it to a PC.

It’s always risky to make predictions about future Apple products (because they have a habit of turning around and biting you on the bum), but I think if you put all the pieces of Apple’s strategy and Jobs’ keynote together, you have to arrive at the conclusion that the iPad is going to be a stand-alone computer one day. Only then can we can truly say we’re living in the post-PC era.