I have noticed that a surprising number of personal acquaintances that have no computer skills, have iPads. The iPad lets them surf the net, read books, email and run some games. They don't have to think about how to use it, it has great battery life, it does the basics that they want and it is fun. One good friend of mine (former business partner) who is almost -intentionally- computer illiterate goes everywhere with his iPad. He loves it. His use is email, basic web surfing and taking notes about what he wants his employees to do. He runs a notepad for each one and keeps track of tasks he has assigned and how they accomplished it. There are way better project management tools out there, but the point is that he, a techno-peasant, is making his iPad do it.
I think a large percentage of the iPad buyers were not techsavvy and the non-threatening aspect of the device is the appeal.
How does he manage without a Mac to use as a "dock" for the iPad? Sincere question, I am a linux user and have only seen an iPad a couple of times, but I understand you need to dock it via iTunes in order to do certain stuff with it.
And when it randomly crashes hard, leaving you looking at the dreaded "Connect to iTunes" screen.
It somehow knows to do this at the moment you're furthest from being able to find a computer with iTunes. My iPod Touch did it when I was on the Pacific coast of Colombia for a month (note the complete absence of roads and towns along said coast).
Getting to a place where I could listen to music again involved an overnight trip on a cargo boat through pirate-infested waters.
But I suspect that was an edge case that Apple didn't have in mind when they designed that feature.
I imagine that if Apple is seriously planning a future where the iPad is the only computer that 'normal' people need then the iTunes requirement will disappear soon. I imagine that some sort of iTunes in the cloud is currently in the works, where all your music and videos are stored by Apple (for a modest fee) and you can either stream directly or sync a subset of it for offline use.
Did you actually read the comment you're replying to?
In this particular anecdote, the nearest Apple store would have been in San Diego, 3200 miles away. The nearest internet connected computer capable of downloading iTunes was a mere 150 miles away in Buenaventura, a 2 hour motor launch, followed by a (weekly) night boat from the village I was in.
It was meant to illustrate that sometimes you take your mobile devices away from civilization. Suggesting that the solution is to bring them back to civilization sort of misses that point.
I did. But if something hard crashes, then it's a fair assumption you're going to have to take it to somewhere where they can fix it. My point is that, if you ignore the out-in-the-wilderness scenario, iPad support is probably friendlier than most PC support for normal people.
If you take your dell laptop back to PC World, don't expect much.
To me this list sounds like a lot of occasions that you'd need a computer - but in actuality, my mother who is an early adopter at nothing except iPads, has been running like this since day 1.
And, as my life is itinerant, I've done multiple 6 week stretches without syncing. It works fine.
I think a large percentage of the iPad buyers were not techsavvy and the non-threatening aspect of the device is the appeal.