Gabe Weatherhead posted an article about where the iPad fits, how it works, and such. In short, I think his underlying premise is off base. There’s a terrible analogy which keeps being trotted out, stated by Weatherhead too, where the Mac is a truck and the iPad is a car, etc etc etc. It’s a Steve Jobs quote, and thus is attributed far more truth than it really should be.
The truth of the matter is, that when the iPad came out, that was a marginally true statement, which felt like it could become true. In reality, even before iOS 11, the iPad isn’t a car and the Mac is far from just a truck.
The Mac is petrol/diesel powered vehicles — be it trucks, cars, or motorcycles. They are what all of us are used to: fill them up, long range, expensive to own, and we control every element of them. Can you work on them yourselves? Yeah. Hell you can even modify them, or if you want you can take them to the Apple Store, I mean, repair shop, for service and work.
Some Macs are trucks, some aren’t — it doesn’t matter. They are all powered by combustible fuel.
iPads are Teslas.
They represent the future of the category. They run efficiently and sip power. They aren’t something you work on yourself, but the most dedicated of which might somehow modify. They don’t have huge range, but they have more range than the average American drives in a day — yet as Americans we some how think that is limiting so we fundamentally reject this authoritarian future of “charging”. But make no mistake, the iPad isn’t a motorcycle or car, to a Mac truck — it’s a newer, better, version of the same thing.
Like Tesla’s, iPads also have a rudimentary version of Auto-pilot. Where the device is starting to do things for you, and that unnerves the shit out of people who really like to control everything. “Where’s my files‽”
A lot of people feel this way about iPads, because change is hard. The truth of the matter is there will always be a place for Macs, just like there will always be a place for gas powered cars — it’s just increasingly likely that the place for those items is soon to become a museum. Until then, they are a useful part of society, but make no mistake: the iPad isn’t an addition to the family, it’s the new family.
Note: This site makes use of affiliate links, which may earn the site money when you buy using those links.