Doctors list why they love Apple products, and miss Steve

It's no secret that the iPad is a hit in the healthcare industry, but doctors love more than just the sleek tablet. A study earlier this year showed that a full 75 percent of US physicians owned some sort of Apple device. In a post Wednesday on MedPage Today, blogger Iltifat Husain tabulated the reasons that doctors love their Apple products, and why they mourn the passing of Steve Jobs.

Husain listed three main reasons: Simplicity, solid build quality and uniformity. In terms of simplicity, Husain mentions that so many medical devices and systems are functional, but poorly designed and often difficult to use. Having Apple devices in their lives gives them something to appreciate, not only because doctors are working around complex devices the rest of the time, but because their profession is so complex as well.

When it comes to solid build quality, Husain said Apple devices extend the solidity of well-built medical equipment into the personal devices carried by physicians. Husain's word about Apple products sound like a love letter: "The feeling of a Macbook Pro confers this; just compare the aluminum unibody hardware build to the majority of plastic casing laptops -- it's a completely different experience. This type of comparison extends into the smartphone and tablet arena as well. The iPad and iPhone 4 have a clearly superior build quality compared to their competitors."

The third reason, uniformity, deals with the user experience -- if you know how to use an iPhone, you immediately know how to work with an iPad. Husain notes that physicians don't have a lot of free time to sit around and figure out how to use new devices and "We don't want to root a mobile phone (Android), just so we can take off the silly skins that a manufacturer throws on so that we can get a better user experience." Doctors want something that just works, and that's something that late Apple CEO Steve Jobs intuitively understood.