Apple's iPad is starting to replace desktop and laptop computers, for a lot of people. Its success tracks closely with declining PC sales at vendors like HP and Dell, and if you count it as a computer it makes Apple the world's top PC vendor, according to Todd Wasserman of Mashable.
How can the iPad replace laptops and desktop PCs? As Matthew Guay of Techinch put it, the iPad is like the microwave oven of computers. It can't do everything a full PC or Mac can, but it can do most things, and it does them with a lot less time and hassle. Besides that, iPad games and apps cost much less than their PC counterparts. The iPad version of iWork, for instance, costs half as much as the Mac version.
Here's a look at some other things people are using their iPads instead of now:
Game consoles
Nintendo considers itself to have won against Sony, but considers Apple the "enemy of the future," as Chris Rawson of TUAW explains. And while Nintendo made record sales on Black Friday, part of the reason was that it'd already dropped the price of its portable 3DS game console by $80 beforehand.
There are still a ton of games you can only play on Nintendo consoles, like the official games for the Mario, Zelda, and Metroid franchises. (Don't forget about Pokemon, either. The latest installments in the series, Pokemon Black and Pokemon White, sold more than 1 million copies in the U.S. within just 24 hours of launch day.)
The iPad has literally thousands of games available, though, including iOS exclusives from top-tier publishers like Square-Enix. So while it can't replace a DS for a Pokemon addict, there are probably a lot of game consoles collecting dust because of it.
E-readers
The Kindle Fire and Nook Color (and Tablet) are all selling extremely well, at least compared to generic-brand "Android tablets". And David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, has noted that a black-and-white e-reader "rekindled" his interest in reading books.
The iPad doesn't exactly compete with the Kindle Fire or the Nook, because they're at different price points. But the iPad does everything they do, and has thousands more apps.
Textbooks
They aren't gadgets, but with the prices on some of them they might as well be; a new college textbook can cost as much as a Kindle Fire or Nook. And now Apple's new iBooks Author program may drop the price of electronic textbooks to $14.99, if you buy them on an iPad.
Not all textbooks are available on an iPad yet, but with publishers like McGraw-Hill signing on already that may change soon.
Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.
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