Ben Parr of Mashable.com wrote an article about his thoughts regarding the iPad titled “Why Apple Could Have Etched “iPad” Into Some Rocks and Sold Millions” and I commented on the article with an anecdotal story that sort of relates to this in a skewed tangent sort of way.

When I think of the iPad, I often compare it to my Austrian made Hard Graft 2Unfold Leather Satchel. This Satchel is ludicrously expensive for a extremely limited bag, it can barely fit a 15″ Macbook Pro, and maybe one thin moleskin notepad and a single hardcover book at most. It’s got two simple pockets in front and that’s about it.

Before this bag I had a numerous variations of laptop bags, some with upwards of 5 divided sections, slots, numerous little compartments inside and out. As it turns out, the more space you have, the more you tend to fill it up with junk you don’t need. As i dug through some side pockets, I’d often find business cards, scraps and other useless stuff I didn’t need. I’ve come to realize that if you have forgotten about it and haven’t touch it for more than a 2 months you probably don’t need it anymore.

What I’ve come to learn to love about my simple leather Hard Graft 2Unfold Bag has in a sense trained me to carry less, carry the essentials. It has two small pockets that I filled with stuff that I use on a regular basis, a couple of pens, a small note pad, a business cards, a usb thumb drive and a small camera.

Ok now why does all this relate to the iPad? Well, as opposed to the PC mindset of netbooks and the like, they are trying to put everything in to them, like multiple card readers, cd-rom, keyboards, trackpads, and other features upon features. The problems is that all eat into the two most important features that we look for which are portability and battery life.

The iPad is going to change people’s thinking of what they really need for a majority of their computing needs. I know you can’t expect to be programming or using photoshop on it but I’ve never been compelled to run Adobe Photoshop while I’m waiting at the airport or on the road. the iPad will train people to rely less and in fact realize that we don’t need much to handle 90% of our general computing needs such as email, calendars, web browsing, contacts, instant message communications, notes, blogging, etc.

After awhile we’ll realize that yes we could sometimes want to upload our images direct to the ipad immediately but we can wait, yes we could run out of space on our 64GB iPads but we’ll learn to sync more often and offload the right stuff regularly, and yes we’ll wish it had a camera for some rare cases but realize that for the most part we don’t need to be taking photos or video conferencing while we are out on the town, we have other resources that do a better job of taking photos. We’ll realize there are many nice to have features but the 10 hour operating time, and the thin light weight form factor is well worth the sacrifice.