For ¥600 ($7) my son bought a concave microphone kit, something he had to build himself. I’m not sure what he learned from the exercise, but I know he now has one of the cooler toys a kid could want. I know that to get the same thing at his age, (jeepers, more than 35 years ago) it would have cost a minimum wage worker at least a couple of hours work.

I remember the first electronic calculator my parents bought me for Christmas when I was in grade 7. It was not a trivial purchase. Perhaps as little as 10 years later I could pick up a small credit card-sized calculator for a couple of bucks. Not long after that, calculators were pretty much disposable.

With the arrival of the iPad, I see society at a point where computers are almost disposable. I suppose we’ve been there for quite some time, but the iPad really is a device that I foresee people upgrading as often as they upgrade their phones. All it will take is an amortization of the cost of the unit. Cell phone companies have been “giving away” phones for years. The iPad, however, will be more insidious in as much as the purpose of the unit is to transmit images.

In a sense, the iPad (for lack of a genre of computer) is the new TV.  Consider how much gold was spent on producing the TV shows of our youth, all to be transmitted to our homes for “free.”  Back in the golden age of TV, the scarcity of channels ensured that if someone was watching TV, there were only a few channels to watch. Hence TV producers could “give away” their programs, knowing their semi-monopoly guaranteed a minimum of eyeballs on their show, and, more importantly, on the ads which paid the bills.

The iPad is the child of TV, in as much as it will guarantee the producer of ads access to eyeballs. Apple, they recently bought a company which allows Apple to insert ads in various content streams. The long term strategy will be to subsidize the cost of the hardware in exchange for watching ads. In other words, whereas ads (still) pay for TV shows (content), Apple will allow ads to pay for your hardware too.

I don’t foresee free iPads any time soon, since Apple will continue to accept money for their unit as long as they can. However, it won’t be long before competitors enter the field and instigate a price war. It is already happening in the digital book  field, with Barnes and Noble slashing their hardware prices, quickly followed by Amazon. Theirs is slightly different model, but it’s an indication of things to come.