One of the comments made by Steve Jobs at his interview at D8 struck a chord with me since I was trying on a very similar metaphor to try and explain the iPad and where it fits in our current computing ecosystem.
Quoted from Macworld:
PCs are like trucks: While talking about the iPad and whether tablet devices are bound to replace the laptop, Jobs resorted to an analogy involving motor vehicles. “PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them… This transformation is going to make some people uneasy. The PC has taken us a long way.”
I was on the route of using a similar idea. The iPad is the souped up motorcycle enclosed in a protective bubble. It’s small, light and fast. It gets you where you’re going in a fun experience and does the job it’s designed to do really well. However, it shares the road with cars and trucks that can haul a lot more stuff, more people etc. Your regular computer is that truck. Its got space for a ton of stuff that you might never use, but hey, if you need to help a friend move apartments it sure comes in handy.
It all comes down to use cases. If you’re commuting to Paris daily on one of the busy roads, you want the motorcycle to squeeze in between the cars (you can do that here). The iPad goes places that a regular computer is unwieldy, but I’m not going to be encoding video files on it.
If you want to stretch the metaphor even further, then you can go back to the introduction of the automobile and all of the attendant disruption. It reminds me of computer gurus at the beginning who didn’t understand the concept of the home computer since a computer was something for calculating ballistic trajectories. Why, it would take up a whole room in the house! Why in the world would you want something like that?
The iPad and the iPhone are Apple’s execution of the communications appliance. There will be lots of others, with their various advantages and disadvantages, just like the variety of motor vehicles out there that fill a variety of needs. The current state of home computing has been driven primarily by compatibility and coherence with the choices of IT who put lots of computers in front of people. Now there’s an option that aligns more closely with a large portion of the population’s primary use cases, but that doesn’t come with the same baggage and learning curve.