The more I think about this the more it  makes sense. The key to the iPad and its marketing is women. The piece that parked this off is here. There are three basic ideas here and all of them do add up to at least a case (how convincing you find it is really up to you) that the key to the iPad's success, indeed, one of the keys to its design, is its attractiveness to women. The first thing to note is that the iPad really isn't a computer. Yes, yes, of course it is but it also isn't. It doesn't multi-task, there are a number of things you simply cannot do on it, you're not going to go all geeky with it. It's much more a piece of consumer electronics than anything else. And when we start to talk about consumer anything we come up against the undisputed fact that women control 80% of discretionary expenditure across the country. No, men may earn more but women get to decide what it's spent on. The second is that again, as a piece of consumer electronics, it's clearly optimised for certain activities. It's not a surprise that Jobs used the Facebook application to show it off. Using Facebook on a regular PC (even a Mac) isn't really quite how most would like to use it I think. Rather than it being something one sits down at the workstation to do you can see that having an iPad by one's side, while on the couch, watching TV, maybe chatting to others in the room as well: that famed multi-tasking perhaps that women are supposedly so good at. The third is, well, back to geeky again. It isn't geeky. There's no webcam, no Flash, most won't care that there's no physical keyboard. It's not made for those who would spend hour upon hour on a task: it's for just having around and using for short periods when one wants to. And the fourth point is that there was indeed a huge imbalance between men and women on the net. And there still is an imbalance in what men and women do once they get on the net. The floods of women who've arrived in the past few years are using, as a matter of choice, the net for this social networking stuff. And that's what the iPad does seem to do better than a PC, the social networking stuff. So maybe that is it then? The iPad is aimed at the female market?