Or, where the iPad is likely to take us.

My God how the netizens love to prognosticate about Apple. It’s not a new phenomena. I’ve been in the Apple fold long enough to have lived through the high-flying ’80s, the “beleaguered” ’90s and the return of the triumphant Apple of the new century. I could have never foreseen the resurgence of the Mac from the early years of OS X. It’s easy to forget the crippling Carbon years, lack of software releases and users relying on legacy apps to get their work done. Yet there were some brilliant moves on the part of the Apple team: The end-around Adobe from NeXT Display Postscript to Display PDF to name just one. The next move from Apple with the release of the iPad? It seems obvious to me…

The Mac will whither on the vine. I predict that within two years or less, Apple will release a “touch screen” iMac that will be the harbinger of a new era of desktop computing. The offerings of Apple for “traditional” computing will continue to diminish. The iPhone software will continue its migration from the iPad to the desktop iMac computing line. The iPad is not so much revolutionary as it is evolutionary. Consumers just want a computer that well, “Just works.” Despite many years of Apple telling the unwashed masses that their computers do just that, they haven’t until now.

Coming from a background in media and not computing I believe gives me a different perspective on this than the average geek. Grandma and Suzy consumer are used to devices that operate when you turn em’ on . They don’t care if it’s “open,” they just want the damn thing to work. As in work like a toaster, radio or TV. The iPad might just be the first computing device that hits anywhere near this target. The iPad is the first incarnation of a truly mature computing device. You want toast? Stick it in a toaster and push the lever down. You want Internet? Touch the iPad and it’s there.

Average computing consumers don’t care that the Apple iPad is a completely closed computing system, but they’ll love the idea that they don’t have to worry about malware, viri or endlessly fiddling with configuration to get it to “work,” because Apple and the AppStore controls the whole widget. No more fudging with permissions, directories, home folders, terminal, fsck. They touch it and it will “Just work.”

Here’s an even bolder prediction: Within 10 years Apple will not even make Macs. All future Apple “computers” will run some version of the iPhone OS. Apple will spin off it’s computing division and licensee OS X. Only this time the clone market won’t cannibalize Apple, because the lions share of its capitol will lie in consumer computing devices running the OS X “Lite” iPhone OS.

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