Birmingham City University's Views@BCU blog asked me to share some thoughts on iPad, as we head into the inevitable release of the new models:

The fifth-generation iPads (and second-gen iPad mini) that we’re expecting in a few days will be released into a very different technology landscape than was the original. The idea of doing at least casual computing on a tablet is now accepted by pretty much everyone, and the iPad has plenty of competitors lining up to steal its place in the popular imagination as the tablet that matters (and more than a few companies prepared to sell them at wafer thin margins – or even at a loss – to get market share).

In truth though, these myriad tablets compete well with the early perception of iPad as a device for consuming media – games, books, movies – but barely register as devices for getting real work done. It’s there that I expect Apple to put in the most effort over the next year, and to some extent we’ve already seen the beginning of this with the ‘desktop class’ 64-bit A7 processor that appeared last month in the iPhone 5s.