Probably projecting from my past ...

Post-iPod, Apple looks to huge content areas to run through its hardware. With the just announced iPad, there is a confluence of content that Apple has already secured: music, apps. But Steve Jobs knows that new hardware must be matched and mated to new gigantic, coherent content sectors. The last slide in his presentation (below) says it all: Steve is going after education as a market. The whole enchilada of educational publishing.

The hardware is spot on: Simple, safe, small, light, cheap (or soon will be) exactly right for students from grade school to grad school. The software provides the creativity/research tools students need. The iWork apps are astonishingly lovely, creative, and fun software.

It will not mean all printed books be damned but it will mean printed textbooks be damned. Maybe it will be textbooks be damned: I’m guessing it’s the creativity tools that Steve really cares about. Ten years out, every student will have an iPad or something just like it. Finally. Except Apple will be there first and foremost. That’s a done deal as of last Wednesday.

Everything about the iPad says that Steve Jobs wants to be remembered as the guy who revolutionized schooling if not learning. Take a look at the mission at the OLPC site. That’s Jobs’s kind of language and vision, except he not only thinks bigger than most of us, he thinks better.

SOURCE: Apple Inc.