My inlaws got an iPad last christmas. They've always had windows machines of one form or another, and hated them.
They liked the iPad experience so much that three of their friends have bought iPads. There's a big market there, and it's hardly been touched.
There are a couple places where they need a bit more than an iPad. The big one is photo management, with a library that's bigger than can fit on the ipad. iCloud isn't there yet. They want to be able to print, write cds/dvds, email them and show them off. There's an opportunity there somewhere.
My parents had the same exact issue. I use dropbox for that. I just change the size of all the images to 1024x768 and share a folder with them with all the pictures. It works marvelously!
Dropbox is an interesting idea with that. Given their API, it's entirely possible to build a bunch of services on top of it, such as archival DVDs, or uploads to printing companies. When I was on vacation, I wound up sending my photos I wanted to print to snapfish via Flickr. (after running them through iPhoto for editing)
There are a couple of sticking points:
* There's still going to be space management issues. 2gb on Dropbox doesn't go far when you've got a 4gb cf in the camera, and the next step up is 100gb@$100/yr.
* the other half of space management is clearing it off of the iPad. It's difficult to manage storage of imported photos, it turns out that if you don't delete them after import to iPhoto on your desktop, you either have to delete them individually or use image capture on the Mac to do it. I'd love to see the high res ones synced off to the cloud, leaving smaller jpegs around, but with the promise that the high res ones were securely stored. What I wound up doing for that was using a USB stick and my work netbook as the real storage for all the holiday images, rather than being able to do it on the iPad.
Finally, and this isn't a problem for the inlaws, but for me as a photographer, I shot raw+jpeg. iphoto imported raw+jpeg, and then didn't use any of the raw data, just the small(well, 8mp) jpegs. I tore through them, using iPhoto as a passible Lightroom substitute. And now, the adjustments are orphaned if I want to apply any of them to the raw files. That's annoying. Not critical, but annoying. And it's not as if there isn't a raw converter in the core of OSX that couldn't be used here.
They liked the iPad experience so much that three of their friends have bought iPads. There's a big market there, and it's hardly been touched.
There are a couple places where they need a bit more than an iPad. The big one is photo management, with a library that's bigger than can fit on the ipad. iCloud isn't there yet. They want to be able to print, write cds/dvds, email them and show them off. There's an opportunity there somewhere.