Once the brown truck rumbled around the corner and the brown box was opened, the iPad demanded that it be linked up with iTunes. I’d read ahead enough to have the 9.1 version ready, and even downloaded and bought some iPad apps the night before. (Apple opened the App Store’s iPad wing on Friday. In anticipation of a first-day rush, I downloaded 27, including some fun as well as the requisite work tools.)

That meant that the bill for the download, including a $14.95 Major Legue Baseball app, was $40-plus including tax. One thing to understand about owning an iPad, or an iPhone: it’s a device that carries a cost of ownership bill, because you will want tools and toys to use on it. The App Store bill arrived this morning with a handy list of the initial apps. As you can see, much of the programs useful to small businesses to keep in touch are either free (news service feeds, social networking) or included.

But Pages and Numbers made their way into my budget, because Apple’s got $9.95 versions of the word processor and spreadsheet. More on those a bit later, but this note: the keyboard included in the multi-touch screen will be just fine for short drafts. Apple has moved up its promised date of delivery for the combo keyboard-dock I ordered March 12. Originally set for April 20, now it’s coming on April 8.

One surprise comes in seeing how smooth the device is: I’ve adopted a knees-bent posture on the sofa to type and enter long data. The third party market will do very well in selling cases for these. I’ll be reviewing some from ColaSac and UNIEA as soon as they get them into our hands.

The iPad is supposed to start to ship by late April, one month earlier if you want the more less expensive Wi-Fi models without 3G. There’s no camera of any kind, still or video, something of a disappointment. No ability to video-Skype from an iPad, alas. And you won’t be able to do more than one thing at a time, which will keep the Apple notebooks a protected niche in the mobile product lineup. Cue the screaming from the world of multitasking fans. This is a bit of good news for Palm and its Pre — which employs a screen about one tenth the size of the iPad. Of course, that Pre’s a phone, too. The iPad has a built-in microphone, so it could be used for Skype-style calling.

The Apple.com site has extensive technical specs and a sassy sales video. A lot of what this tablet can do is best observed from Apple’s video. Significant strides have been made in display technology (for reading, and sharing the screen), enabled by Apple’s custom-built chip to drive the whole device.

Shots from today’s rollout showed the scale of the tablet as well as the interface:

The device will run “just about every iPhone app unmodified,” so it’s got business applications immediately. More than just Maps or Mail, but also every customized app aimed at niches use like medical reporting or scientific testing. Apple will double the pixels on an app that comes up on the iPad.

When considering that ATT is the only 3G provider here at first release, it might as well be considered a Wi-Fi only device– because the only useful data plan for 3G is $30 monthly. If you already use an iPhone, this will be an extra data charge. On the other hand, you might downgrade your phone away from the iPhone, if you can use the 3G experience in the larger format. The summary:

Apple’s entered the processor derby with this product, a reinforcement of its love of control of the entire offering. The iPad runs on an Apple-built 1GHz chip, the A4. That’s a first; Apple has used chips built by other suppliers in all of its devices up to now.

Apple promises 10 hours of battery life on a charge and a 1-month standby time. That would improve on the standby time of the Kindle — you can’t leave that unattached for a month and expect it to come to life. But 10 hours advertised will be less than that in actual use. Steve Jobs demonstrated the product and said he could fly to Tokyo and watch video the entire time. Good luck on using the product with the Internet for 10 hours. We’d bet that in practice the battery will last probably somewhat more than average iPhone use. But compared to a notebook, and the 10 hours sounds good.

McGraw-Hill has said its textbooks will be available on the iPad, and the New York Times is hoping to sell articles through the iTunes store. The whole paper — rendered as a product you purchase for the iPad — looked like this:

But the motherlode, what’s could give it an edge over Amazon’s Kindle, is the included iBooks software and the iBookstore. Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, five of the six biggest publishers, are on board. Here’s a shot via Engadget of iBooks:

Most important to the average business user who’s making a mobile device do the work of a Mac is the iPad’s keyboard. Here’s a shot of the onscreen keyboard at the introduction.

as well as the 10-key pad running below while using Apple’s Numbers application. Numbers and Pages (the iWork apps) will run on the iPad. And Apple says that Numbers and Pages are going to cost just $9.99. This is one of the reasons why Apple bothered to create these competitors to Word and Excel. They can control the price of their users’ tools.

But the best business aspect of this new computing device — and this is unlike anything mobile released for serious business use — is a dock that includes a keyboard. You don’t have to use a virtual keyboard on the screen, if you’re at a desk working.

This device is going to generate more than revenue for the hardware part of the solution. A new Apple iBookstore joins the App Store and the iTunes store. Books are going to be more costly at the iBookstore, at $12.99 to $14.99 — about in line with the Sony eReader titles.

If you own an iPod Touch, this iPad is a book-sized version of that device, sans microphone — but with external input options and 3G capability. Considering the Touch’s cost today, the price of $499-$829 for the iPad looks like it might attract more business users to Apple’s multi-touch interface experience.

The Grey Lady used to be more cautious about its speculations, but the staff flowing in from online jobs have stretched the rumor envelope. The tiny article in the Times‘ Bits blog was written by Ashlee Vance, new to the newspaper’s staff after a long and flashy run at the Web site The Register.

The Microsoft “slate computer” was supposed to be part of MS VP Steve Ballmer’s keynote speech last night. Alas, what some around HP are calling The Courier didn’t debut. Vance wrote great articles for The Register, but the standards for rumors are limbo-low over there.

Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, will unveil a novel take on a slate-type computer during his evening keynote.

The Times only posted the initial rumor article on the Bits blog, not in a printed edition, so the editors only figured they had to post a generic follow-up today on the non-story. The rumor report shows how little can be counted upon for innovation from Microsoft. HP has had its hands on touchscreen technology since 1984, but the last two years it has had serious touch products released. Last night’s cobble was not one of them.

One of the best summaries of What Just Didn’t Happen came in the comments to the Vance article. One reader quoted the line from the article, “So the last thing Mr. Ballmer wants to hold up is a me-too device,” then added

The good news for MS: That didn’t happen.
The bad news for MS: Nothing else happened, either.The Microsoft blasts are just a click away in this story:

Just another full-blown Ballmer clownboy fiasco. Courier was vaporware. MS went out of their way to throw their cards down on the table and show that they’ve got NOTHING, and plenty of it. If Jobs shows up to demo a yo-yo, he beats Ballmer now.

Journalists still want to write stories that kill off or condemn with faint praise the interesting mobile device coming from Apple. Predictions are a loser’s bet, but we all want to deliver them.

Far better advance reports on the iSlate are coming from Jon Gruber at his daringfireball.net site. I’ll just echo what he’s forecast — an impressive range of content, sculpted for the Apple device, will be part of the vendor’s rollout solution. You want to read a Conde Nast publication online? Some say those pubs will be ready on Day One of the iSlate rollout.

Gruber is also dead-on about an App Store or iTunes experience for the iSlate. Apple takes 30 cents of every dollar for apps and music. This new mobile tool will be a revenue generator for Apple, and not just from the sales of the hardware.

Five places to do a better disk upgrade than inside

Mac accessory supplier iFixIt is selling a solution to add two bigger drives inside the well-sealed-up Mac Mini. The concept means cracking the case on this half-shoebox sized computer and replacing the Superdrive with a faster and bigger disk. No more CD/DVD option after this.

Any plan to crack a Mini for this is crackers. The Mini runs without a fan and manages to keep itself cool enough to keep operating. But the back of that little miracle is warm-plus with just one drive running inside. With a Firewire 800 port on the back, putting another heater of a drive inside asks for trouble that Apple won’t fix.

Upgrading the memory inside is a different, better reason to use a putty knife to get that case open. Apparently once you get 2GB of memory inside, the Mini can recognize 256MB of it for better graphics performance.

But adding that memory happens one of two ways: You buy the $799 unit from Apple in the sealed and warranteed case, or you get inside to beef up the $599 model to 2GB. Just because you or your geeky pal can do something like update memory for you doesn’t mean you should. Saving $200 on the cheaper unit (well, about $175 after you buy the extra memory) could cost you later in warranty. The smaller the Mac, the more chance it will need Apple’s service if something goes awry. It’s close quarters inside there.Or get that geek-pal’s number and a backup system for when the Mini gets to be hot stuff. Cooling is an overlooked part of keeping computers happy. You could crank up your air conditioning to Stun, but that would spend the same $175 in the power bill. Seems safer to leave the insides to the Apple on this Mac.

Adding those bigger replacement disks also seems like a lot of work for not much boost to the computer. Agreed: The Mini’s built-in disk is a slowpoke at 4200 RPM. But the replacement disks only run about 30 percent faster while they add that heat. It’s a plastic case, friends. Leave the extra storage outside, attached to one of the five, count ‘em, five ports, USB 2.0 or Firewire 800.

Analysts and pundits have estimated that the average price of a Mac dropped 8 percent this week. The 24-inch iMac sells for $300 less than its predecessor, and the only thing a buyer seems to give up is one Firewire 400 port and the numeric keypad portion of the keyboard. In exchange there’s twice the memory, more than double the graphics speed, and a disk twice as big as its predecessor. (I know these numbers well, since I bought the 24-in predecessor in January.)

But it’s still a $1,499 computer, my friend says. You can get PCs like this for a lot less. A lot turns out to be around $200 if you stick to a name brand. How much value that $200 represents is the genuine question. Around here, we buy Macs and use them for five years or more. That’s $40 a year difference, about what you spend on one tankful of gas, no matter how big a car you drive.Small business buys with an eye toward durability. Consumers, not so much. You can go back to the old bromide of thrift to find a route around this “Macs are expensive” mirage. Some people know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. People will always want a lower cost for whatever they’ve bought. A $72 HP printer has a terrible cost: hours of struggle to get it to work with Windows, plus the flimsy construction that will give out quicker than a more costly model.

My only retort to my friend’s Macs=Expensive slur? “More expensive than PCs, yes. But we don’t have to use Windows on them, do we?” He could only nod in reply. Me, I’ll take any week with an 8 percent price cut in an improved product. That’s something like a Starbucks grande at the price of a tall.

Ah, but the Mini. It continues its ascent as the best Mac for the dollar. For the same prices, the system now has solved its old-dog-slow graphics speed with an NVIDIA chipset; doubled the limit for RAM (see above); and increased the top speed of the processor to 2.26 GHz. Mind you, you’ve got to buy the faster of the two Mini models to get all that, but at just a $200 increase, it’s well worth it.

Apple makes much of its new Mini DisplayPort on the mini to connect monitors. It’s a genuine value for the mini if you’re got DisplayPort monitors, but not much of a bump for the mini customer already using a DVI screen. Like Firewire, DVI is getting pushed to the door by Apple, which is shifting its display focus to DisplayPort. The system includes a mini DVI to DVI adapter, but you can see the trend here. Smaller is better, but it demands peripheral replacements, too.

These improvements are welcome for the first-time buyer, since Apple is maintaining its prices on these systems with the extra features. You’d think there was a recession on, and analysts reported that Mac sales dropped during the last 90 days. Up to now, the mini was pretty useless for graphics-based work, even something as simple as page layout using InDesign. Now there’s 256MB of memory on a NVIDIA 9400 graphics chip. For $800, plus a low-ball $32 Kensington wireless keyboard from Wal-Mart, it’s hard to go wrong going small on the Mac line.

To the regret of some, the Firewire 400 has no port on the new mini. Video users will have to upgrade their devices to use a new mini. You will need a 400-to-800 adapter ($15 plus shipping from Sonnet) to hook up that elderly camcorder. There’s also supposed to be 800 to 400 cables with 4-pin ends on the 400 side. Apple is in love with USB 2.0, although users say the Firewire standard truly is faster. There’s a great article on this on the MacWorld mag site; some of the best information is in comments under the article. Alas, with the improved Mini, some things gained, others lost. At least there’s still some kind of Firewire port on both iMac and mini model. Macworld magazine has a good article on the demise of Firewire 400.

Today’s announcements mean more for the same price, so if you’ve been waiting to upgrade from that old G5 tower, this is the month. These values might last for another year, until Apple does its next refresh.