After seeing Apple's unveiling of the new iPad tablet yesterday my overall conclusion is that the product is very solid and will probably find a niche with certain users, but it hardly seems to be the game changer for old media that many had hoped for.
Essentially the iPad is a thin, light-weight, extremely mobile device that can be described as a supersized iPhone or a thin netbook computer. You can surf the web, check email, play iTunes, and download iPhone-like apps customized for the device.
The real issue I see is that the iPad is not all that different than a netbook or iPhone, other than its physical design. The only unique feature of the iPad seems to be a new e-book store. In addition to buying songs, movies, and television shows from iTunes you will be able to buy e-books from an e-book store, modeled after the iPhone app store and the iTunes media store. Think thin netbook combined with an Amazon Kindle.
The clear loser here is Amazon, whose Kindle overnight gets a strong competitor. The clear winners were supposed to be the content publishers, including magazine and newspaper companies, not just book publishers. On that end, I think the expanded distribution of e-books will be good for those publishers, but the gains for newspapers and magazines is less apparent.
The problem those publishers face today is that most are giving away their content on the web and the advertising revenue they earn from web visitors pales in comparison to the subscription revenue they used to collect. Some have been able to charge for web content (Wall Street Journal) and others are starting to put pay walls on their sites (New York Times) but with so many free news sources on the web, it will be hard for most publishers to convince consumers to pay a monthly fee for their content.
I am not convinced the iPad solves this problem. The content companies will build apps for the iPad, just as they did for the iPhone, but the core issue is the same; will people pay for the content when there are other free options? If the answer is yes, then the publishers will get stronger going forward. If not, nothing will change.
If you put your content on the iPad for free, that is no different than the free web site people are using to access your content. If people are not willing to pay to use your web site today, why would they be willing to pay for an iPhone or iPad app with the same content?
Even after seeing the iPad in action, I think the content game is unchanged. If you truly have valuable content that is unique and in strong demand (Wall Street Journal), you can make good money with online content. If not, people will simply go to free news sites and your profits will evaporate as subscription revenue continues to decline.
Where does this leave Apple stock? They will likely sell a good number of iPads going forward so the product is certainly an incremental positive for the company and the stock. Believe it or not, the shares have been treading water for a while now, and therefore are not overly expensive. At $207 per share Apple sports a P/E ratio of about 18x based on $11-$12 of earnings power this year. Add in the $27 per share ($25 billion) of cash that is wasting away on their balance sheet and you can see that the stock is not super-cheap but is not overly expensive by any means.
Full Disclosure: Peridot Capital was long shares of Apple at the time of writing, but positions may change at any time