iPad: The Microwave Oven of Computing

Matthew Guay nails it in his story at Techinch: the iPad is the microwave oven of this computing era, a new device for everyone that might seem useless at first, but creates a new category for consumers.

The microwave isn’t easier for every cooking task, and perhaps it takes longer to prepare a complicated meal in a microwave. Perhaps no award winning meal will be created in one, unless it’s a special contest for microwave cooking. But it simplified simple cooking, and consumers around the world saw it as a necessary piece of equipment within in years of it becoming popular.

Decades later, the same concept works for computers and the iPad:

The world has discovered that the iPad doesn’t have to be a full computer to be successful. It’s a new form factor that makes computing more accessible to more people than ever. Sure, you might not create a new app on it, and there’s still not Photoshop on iOS. You can’t bake a medium-rare roast in a microwave, either. But now instead of waiting for your computer to boot, you can read the news, type a short document, and get on with your day all in the time your aging desktop takes to boot.

Maybe you won’t be able to manage your WordPress blog entirely from the iPad, not even in 2012, and perhaps you’d like to turn yourself to the Xbox 360 if you want motion-based games. But for anything else, you’re just as good with an iPad as millions of people were with a microwave oven when it first came out. And by the way, I also happen to get lots of things done on my iPad.