With Tuesday’s’s announcement of a 128GB iPad 4, Apple is clearly signaling that the iPad is not only suitable for serious work, but that it can be the primary machine for many users. Most commenters have fixated on fitting extra movies and other consumables into the extra 64GB of space, but they’re forgetting about work.

In fact, I’d say that the iPad With Retina Display, as Apple now insists on calling it, is the new desktop machine, and the iPad mini is the new laptop. Why? Let me explain:

The Bookcase is a three-dollar pocket database for your book collection, one that takes its role very seriously and might be best suited to people with a professional requirement to manage a large library.

When I’m not seated in front of a computer, I use my iPad mini for almost everything I need to do online. Checking my emails, banking, streaming movies and music, and reading the day’s news — it’s all done on a tablet. And it turns out I’m not the only one who’s abandoning my PC for a handheld.

Perion, the creator of IncrediMail, today unveiled the results of its latest survey of 4,400 iPad owners in the United States. The majority of respondents said they consider Apple’s popular tablet their favorite device for reading and writing emails, beating PCs and smartphones by a wide margin.

Instapaper 4.2 has just hit the App Store, and it’s a pretty big update. The headline feature is a new iBooks-style page-turn animation, but there is a lot more in there besides.

I recall the time I met someone who was not only vision impaired, but nearly blind. However, their loss of vision didn’t prevent them from enjoying computers. Although we were both able to get a lot done, they wouldn’t have been able to get as much as I can get done without special tools like a large display with overly magnified and software enhancements on their computer.

Apple’s iOS mobile operating system offers nearly the same features to help the vision impaired and even people who depend on reading glasses to see things displayed on the iPhone’s tiny display. Here’s how to access them.

Evernote has announced “Clearly,” a new browser extension that mimics other enhanced reading services, like Instapaper and Readability. Clearly is available for Google Chrome now, with support coming for other browser in the near future.

While Evernote already lets you save webpages, take notes, archive memories and more, Clearly has one simple, clear (pardon the pun) focus: distraction-free reading.

Earlier this summer, Apple introduced the new Reading List feature in Safari 5 as part of Mac OS X Lion’s widescale release. This new feature lets you save web pages until you have time to read them later. It is a handy feature that you might find yourself accessing a lot so the tips today will help you do that as quickly as possible.

As I noted the other day, I recently completed a near-endless trip around the world, and I used my iPad for pretty much everything while on the plane. And the more I think about it, the more it’s clear to me that I will never again go on vacation with a laptop.

Here are my top 10 reasons why:

10. Though heavy, iPads weigh less than any hardcover and most paperbacks.
A lot of people, me included, spend a lot of time whining about how heavy the iPad is. But at 1.5 pounds, it’s a lot lighter than any edition of every single book in Oprah’s club.

9. Endless battery life makes a lack of power outlets irrelevant.
Whether with my iPhone or my MacBook, I can’t count the number of times that I’ve started watching a movie on a plane only have the power give out partway through. I seriously can’t imagine how that would ever happen with an iPad. Depending on the task, I’ve gotten well over two hours of battery life after getting the 20 percent warning.