I read the news the other day and, oh boy, HP didn’t do so well with the Slate 500, a traditional tablet-based PC using Windows 7. Yes, they did boast the fact that they sold more than they anticipated, but with total sales estimated at 9,000, that’s nothing to crow about.

Perhaps HP can state, in their defense, that this tablet was designed strictly for business customers. But the iPad has gained amazing traction in the enterprise. Didn’t Apple claim, at their last quarterly conference call with financial analysts, that most of the largest companies were testing or deploying iPads? If that’s the case, maybe Apple doesn’t have to worry about an enterprise strategy, despite claims from some tech pundits that they’re on the wrong track.

Then again, how many of those critics could, if given the chance, actually run a multibillion dollar multinational corporation without destroying it in six months flat? I wonder.

This week, in fact, there’s a story from Galen Gruman, in InfoWorld, which touts the growth of the iPad in business, while at the same time explaining how HP’s strategy has crashed. Typical business uses for the iPad include the financial community, lawyers, and health care professionals.

When the iPad first came out, I thought of it as a great tool for physicians and nurses to carry with them as they make their rounds in medical offices or hospitals. The wireless networking capability would allow them to consult medical records for patients, or perhaps even request tests and order prescriptions with connecting to the hospital’s wired network. They’d be able to easily enter information about the status of their consultations, which would immediately become part of your patient record.

Now the health care industry has traditionally used regular tablet note-books. Our family physician does, but the process involves the clumsy transition between stylus for entering data on the screen, keyboard entry, and back again. It’s rare to enter loads of text, so an iPad may be the perfect vehicle, assuming the appropriate software exists to make it happen.

According to Gruman’s article, Apple has actually sent staffers to talk to company officials to evangelize use of the iPad. What a change from the Apple of the past, which would never dirty itself to push product to the enterprise.

But there’s more!

In the auto industry, luxury car makers are starting to deliver those typically humongous and complicated user manuals on spanking new iPads. The most recent convert is Hyundai, the Korean car maker that recently introduced an expensive vehicle, the Equus, designed to compete with the likes of Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz.

Let’s take this move a step further: Car sales people might also be outfitted with iPads, rather than traditional desktop PCs, to look up inventory, place orders and, of course, enter credit information to determine if a prospective customer qualifies for financing.

Certainly, the real estate business would also present great potential for the iPad. Agents can display photos of homes from their “listing servers” to customers, and perhaps take a mortgage application.

In factories, the iPad certainly would suit the needs of plant supervisors, who would need to make sure the production lines are moving efficiently, and handle inventory concerns and potential quality control issues on the scene.

I would imagine that attorneys might find iPads suitable for use not just in the office, but in the courtroom, where they could quickly consult huge libraries of legal precedents without having to bring in regular note-books or huge boxes of books. Just imagine a trial where the judge examines information on the iPads used by both prosecution and defense to demonstrate whether an objection has merit.

Looking at the reality and the possibilities, it’s clear that not just consumers are going to be buying loads of iPads this holiday season. This product has legs, and let’s not stop there.

When it comes to the iPhone, their increasing deployment in the business world, often as replacements for Blackberrys, is telling. Each and every revision of the iOS brings with it more enterprise-worthy features that are designed to make the iPhone more valuable in the business world. This is where Android-based devices are still playing catch up.

What makes this turn of events most fascinating is the fact that Apple has traditionally sold gear to consumers, not to businesses. They have never specifically tailored Macs for the enterprise, except, perhaps, for the Mac Pro, which is widely used by content creators who crave the ultimate in computing power, and are willing to pay high prices for the right tools.

The rest of the Mac lineup remains decidedly consumer friendly. The MacBook Air is even being touted by Apple as the future of the note-book, what with the lack of an optical drive, solid state storage, and strictly wireless networking; that is, unless you buy a USB dongle to connect directly to an Ethernet network.

But the long and short of it is that the enterprise suddenly looms as a major and surprising source of growth for Apple.

I admit to being a fan of the legendary “Fab Four,” but their arrival on iTunes this week failed to elicit more than yawn on my part. It’s not as if the music, even in digitally remastered form, hasn’t been available from physical media outlets for quite some time. You could always rip your CDs in iTunes for your Apple mobile gear, so where’s the benefit?

The Beatles promotion, which will include lots of TV ads, will surely keep Apple’s download servers busy for a while, but the real issues facing Apple lie elsewhere. With the holiday lineup present and accounted for, estimates of Mac sales for the current quarter are in the low to middle of the four million range — record territory again — with the MacBook Air contributing an unknown amount to these figures.

With wide expansion of the iPad, even via Verizon Wireless, estimates of total sales appear to be off the charts now that production has evidently caught up with demand, more or less. So-called iPad killers appear to be having uncertain success. HP is reporting that they sold some 9,000 Slate 500 tablets, which is supposed to be beyond their expectations, but is embarrassing for such a large corporation. How well the Samsung Galaxy Tab will fare is anyone’s guess. I suppose part of it depends on whether Steve Jobs is right that a 7-inch tablet, such as Samsung’s, is the wrong form factor. Besides, unless you want to be saddled with a data contract from a wireless provider, you won’t save any money if you buy one.

If there’s a downside to the iPad’s potential, it may be the expectations of a better model, complete with one or two cameras, some time next year. But people who keep waiting for model upgrades often never buy anything. There’s always something better on the horizon.

I expect that the iPod will score reasonably well, but sales will continue to stutter, unless, of course, you are willing to count the iPhone as a souped up iPod, in which case they continue to soar. What’s more, with over 14 million iPhones shipped last quarter, and distribution expanding, you might expect another blow-out quarter, although Android OS-equipped gear will still do better, since there are more models and more carriers.

Once the Verizon Wireless version of the iPhone appears — and that appears a near-certainty for early in 2011 — the Android onslaught may not seem so compelling, even to rabid Apple critics. This isn’t to say that Google’s open source mobile OS will suddenly falter. There are millions of customers who are looking for the bigger, better deal, and they don’t care about the fineries of the iOS compared to Android, RIM or anything else.

The potential for Windows Phone 7 is still unsettled. It appears the first devices equipped with Microsoft’s new mobile OS sold well in some places, not so well in others. I do see that Microsoft has already made some overtures towards product placement on TV shows. Just the other night, the distinctive tiles on a Windows Phone 7 smartphone were clearly depicted in a closeup during a crucial scene on ABC’s lighthearted mystery drama, “Castle.”

On the long haul, however, Microsoft has barely kept up with last year’s smartphones in terms of OS capabilities, and there’s loads of competition out there. It’s not the PC versus Mac wars revisited, where Microsoft is forever destined to be dominant. That train left the station long, long ago.

By dint of its slow march to the top of the tech universe, Apple is now the company to beat, but the situation is different. Sure, Apple remains number one in the music business, and the iPad controls 95% of the tiny tablet computer market. But there’s little certainty that margin will hold once loads of imitations are available.

With smartphones, Apple only needs to carve out a decent double-digit share to make loads of money, even if other players move more product to carriers and customers. Apple’s won’t build hardware from which they can’t earn a sizable profit. That posture continues to confound the skeptics, who continue to insist there ought to be cheap Macs, and a smaller iPhone and iPad, to satisfy people who can’t afford the full-blown versions.

Apple still makes loads of cash from the sale of Macs, and nobody’s suggesting the Mac OS will supplant Windows in our lifetimes. What will likely happen is that other products, perhaps the iPad or a successor, will take over the volume portion of the PC market. The existing form factors will continue to be sold to professional content creators, but even company employees who used to receive note-books for travel are now being offered iPads in many cases.

At the same time, the existing PC configuration model continues to change. Apple is busy throwing traditional storage devices to the winds. Floppy drives died in the last decade, optical drives will disappear soon, and the old fashioned mechanical hard drive, using technology refined from inventions of several decades ago, is an endangered species. Solid state drives with large storage capacities are destined to become affordable before long.

The personal computer of the future will be totally wireless, not tethered to traditional Ethernet networks, and forget about using external storage. But between the MacBook Air and the iPad, we’ve already seen Apple’s future direction, and that’s precisely where they’re going.

I read an article the other day quoting an executive from Lenovo claiming that far fewer and fewer customers were buying note-books with optical drives. The number continues to decrease year after year.

But Apple already figured that out when the MacBook Air was originally introduced.

At the time, the Air was roundly criticized because of the lack of the usual connection ports, such as Ethernet and FireWire, and the fact that there was no internal optical drive. How could you possibly exist without being able to run CDs and DVDs? Oh yes, you could get an external USB-based device, if that’s what you wanted, but I wonder how many Apple actually sold.

The question of the lack of Blu-ray on Macs has pretty much been answered already. It’ll never happen on a Mac. Steve Jobs has other priorities, and the “bag of hurt” licensing is evidently the least of it.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am decidedly reluctant to acquire a computer without a DVD drive. But the fact of the matter is that I rarely use them. Sure, sometimes I make a CD copy of music I’ve downloaded from iTunes. I have a large spindle of optical media that I bought two or three years ago, but I’ve only burned a dozen discs since then. On a rare occasion, I’ve even installed software that way, although, with the exception of OS upgrade packages, most of what you need can be downloaded online. That’s how I got my copy of the last Adobe Creative Suite, though it took a while to retrieve the entire installer.

The optical drive on my MacBook Pro has only been used once or twice since I acquired it, and I can’t even say for certain if it even works anymore. Maybe I should test it again before the warranty runs out.

Indeed, when Apple talks up the MacBook Air as a next generation product, you only have to look at what’s there, and what isn’t, to see what a future MacBook Pro might be like.

I do not realistically expect that the number of USB ports will be reduced, and the professional users who have embraced this product won’t stand for the loss of FireWire or Ethernet. Intel’s forthcoming high-speed Light Peak might also be part of the picture. But all that’s trivial in the scheme of things. The key changes you’re apt to see are the total elimination of mechanical hard drives and optical devices. Gone, kaput, history.

It makes sense to want to ditch the traditional hard drive. On a note-book, they can be slow, and far more susceptible to damage. If you drop your note-book, and the display survives, even the best safety mechanisms might still leave you with a damaged drive, although we all know they can fail unexpectedly anyway even under normal use and service.

It really doesn’t matter if your drive is under warranty. They will only guarantee the mechanism, not what’s on it. No wonder drive recovery services continue to prosper, because most of you still don’t have a regular backup regimen.

However, all this doesn’t necessarily mean solid state storage will take over all but the professional markets overnight. Even though the MacBook Air is strictly SSD, the cost remains high for a reasonable amount of capacity, many times that of the equivalent amount of mechanical storage. It will take several years before pricing comes down to a sensible level for the 128GB to 512GB storage most of you would expect.

More to the point, if the suspected Apple dream of cloud-based computing comes to pass, maybe you won’t need to put all your stuff on a MacBook anyway. Your iTunes music and video libraries, often the largest file repositories on a typical Mac, will be stored somewhere in Apple’s new server farm. You’ll only need local copies for backup, when you don’t have Internet access, or maybe only enough data will be cached to keep you running until your online service is restored.

That situation, however, depends on nearly full-time broadband access. With perhaps a third of the population of the U.S. saddled with dial-up, whether they want it or not, that may not be a goal easily achieved. That’s one thing Apple seems to forget as system updates grow larger and larger.

When it comes to the optical drive, if you can depend on copying your stuff to the iPhone, iPod or iPad, or just streaming your music and movies to the device of your choice, one of the essential requirements for such a storage system will be eliminated. Assuming the Mac App Store takes over a large portion of the software market, aside from existing online resources, you won’t need an optical drive to load software. The rest can, as with the OS installation for the MacBook Air, be provided on a USB drive.

What confounds the skeptics is that Apple continues to look at what the tech world will be next year, five years from now, and even in the next decade. Companies that only comprehend this quarter and the next will never see that vision, but once Apple establishes a trend, you can expect the bottom feeders to quickly chase after them.

Change is in the wind. There are more and more stories in the mainstream media that you won’t be forced to sign up with AT&T to use an iPhone in the U.S within a few weeks. But I’ll avoid the issue of jailbreaking the phone and using T-Mobile instead, which one of my friends has done for reasons he’s never been able to explain.

Now it’s not that AT&T is necessarily a bad wireless provider. But they have had trouble building out enough capacity to offer a decent connections in some parts of the country. Complains in such locales as San Francisco are legion, although the company claims they are making progress. Here in the Phoenix area, it works just fine.

While it made sense for Apple to partner with a single larger carrier when the iPhone was just a gleam in Steve Jobs’ eyes, this gadget has joined the iPod to achieve iconic status. More iPhones than Blackberrys are sold nowadays, even though RIM has support from more carriers and has many more models to choose from.

The feeling early on was that Verizon Wireless was offered the iPhone, but refused to give Apple the keys to the store. Verizon wants you saddle you with their own software and custom user interface, even though both may offer substandard user experiences. It would probably be worse than giving the Mac OS a full-time Windows user interface.

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