I am going to respectfully disagree with Kellogg Professor Mohan Sawhney who recently wrote “I think the iPad is aimed squarely at the center – of nowhere.” My argument boils down to three primary points:
1. Neither early laptops nor iPods were truly mass consumer devices. Their progeny were, but those first incarnations were not.
2. If you try to think of the iPad as a “complete substitute for either a laptop or a netbook or a smartphone” as he argues, you have already erred. It is not.
3. You and I are not typical consumers.

Here we go:

1. The Allegory of the Laptop. I bought my first laptop in 2001. I thought of it as a “great addition to my desktop.” But hardly a great investment from a TCO perspective. I presupposed I would use it whenever I went to the Stanford Library to study, when I was traveling, or perhaps sitting outside in the Oval on one of those famously sunny Palo Alto afternoons. Never, however, did I imagine it replacing my desktop. Why? It couldn’t. The technology wasn’t quite there yet. Battery life was abysmal, the processor was more anemic than the venerable Irom Sharmilla on her 10-year hunger strike and Wi-Fi was still crying from its crib in infancy and not present on my laptop. Oh yeah, and I couldn’t see the screen outside–so much for working outside in the Oval. BTW, have you ever tried using a computer recently that wasn’t connected to the internet? WHAT THE HELL IS IT GOOD FOR?!

But then something changed. In about 2005 or 2006, I noticed some dust on my desktop both literally and figuratively. (Seriously, my room was a mess, the thing was filthy.) I didn’t need my desktop anymore. The equation had changed. I could now do 95% of everything I needed to on my laptop. I thought of my big, custom-built desktop as really only useful for large Excel documents, video games and as a big hard drive for my MP3/AAC collection.

The same is true for iPods. I bought an original iPod way back when. I still have it. It’s black and white, has a FW400 port, is thick as brick, practically needs its own wheelie suitcase to transport and cost $600. I remember my friend Kali asking/reprimanding me at the time, “What the hell is that? You spent $600 on an MP3 player!!!” [Ed: Actually, Kali this MP3 player will shake the very foundations of the computing industry.] That original iPod was not ready for mass market. It was a niche product for alpha geeks like me. But you know what? It wasn’t a mistake. The technology evolved, Apple executed and it turned out that everyone wanted thousands of songs in their pocket (i.e. once the iPod could fit in a regular size pocket). PS-I apologize for the misleading title of this section. That was in no way an allegory.

2. The  iPad is a new device, don’t pigeonhole it bro. I readily admit the iPad is neither a laptop, netbook or mobile phone. It is not supposed to be. Good product design requires as much sacrifice as it does integration. To understand this, you need to think different for a second. To lose the inhibition, follow your intuition. Free your inner soul and break away from tradition. You categorically CANNOT look at the iPad and determine its utility by comparing it to other products. YOU MUST COMPARE IT TO CUSTOMERS NEEDS. Does it have 10x USB and 4x FireWire 800 ports? No. Does it have a 15x dual-layer burnable Dual-Scribe DVD Writer? No. I agree–from that perpsective it sucks. But so do feature lists. Do most people need those things? No! You need to start by asking what people use these devices/tools for.

3. My girlfriend does not have a computer at home. Right now, your mind just exploded and it’s just a red, gooey mess. But, Marketing 101, baby–you and I are not the typical consumer. Most people don’t go home and run conjoint analyses in Excel on weekends. But my girlfriend is closer to the typical consumer. What does she need? First, she has a computer at work. She uses that for most computationally and input mechanism intense tasks that she does–like large spreadsheets and long emails. She also surfs the web on it and takes care of most of personal internet needs through it. Second, at home and on her person, all she’s got is her Blackberry Pearl. Why? Because when she gets home she mostly emails, surfs a web page or two and makes a few phone calls. My girlfriend is the perfect example of a potential future iPad customer. Not today’s iPad mind you–too geeky for her. But perhaps iPad version 3. One day, Gilt or Groupon will come up with a social shopping app that she’ll need to have and the iPad v3 will arrive via FedEx the next day in a white box. Just like it was with the iPod…

Conclusion
Most people do “intense” computer work in the office on their office supplied machines. When they get home, they use the web for leisure, socializing and communication–exclusively. And for those of us who spend 5-10% of our time at home working, we can probably afford both an iPad and a laptop. Although as the iPad improves and you and I catch up to the new reality, we’ll begin to realize we think of our laptops like we think of desktops today–ornery beasts used for work. We’ll spend the majority of our time at home on the iPad, not our laptops. Desktops and laptops were expected to be used for both leisure and work. The iPad has for the first time truly separated “leisure” from “business” computing in terms of devices. From now on, the iPad/tablet is a “leisure” computing & web device, while laptops are “business” devices. This was brilliant customer and product segmenting, targeting and positioning by Apple. Is this all a sure bet? Hell no. There are risks up the wazoo in everything and anything I said coming to fruition–as was the case with the original iPod. But is it a bet I’d take if I were SJ? Hell yeah, I would.