He said Apple would continue to sell trucks and cars, but he expects the cars to cannibalize the truck market.
There's no use in a truck with a bed cover that's locked into place and unremovable. There's equally no use in a truck that's not built body-on-frame, and the Mac, one of my favorite computing platforms, is moving away from it.
The truck analogy wasn’t about internal upgradability, it was about devices running a mobile OS versus devices with desktop OS (notebooks, desktops, etc.). In Jobs’ analogy, the upcoming Mac Pro is just as much a truck as the current one is. However, Steve Jobs didn’t say that Apple would continue selling trucks, just that companies would.
Here’s the full quote:
When you did your presentation on the iPad, you described it as a new category of device, says Walt [Mossberg]. But in order for it to succeed, people have to feel that it’s worth carrying around. Do you think the tablet will succeed the laptop, he asks.
“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people. … I think that we’re embarked on that. Is the next step the iPad? Who knows? Will it happen next year or five years from now or seven years from now? Who knows? But I think we’re headed in that direction.”
Your analogy is nothing like what Apple is doing. A more apt analogy would be selling trucks that don't have easily upgradeable engines where you wouldn't be able to access the engine components without a ton of work, which is exactly how they build most trucks nowadays. The sealed bedcover is more like a limitation in software since that's part of the functionality of the truck. Upgrading a Mac isn't part of the functionality, it's something you do to increase the speed at which you work on it.
And as for the body-on-frame comparison, I don't really know what you mean there. If you are talking about the actual, physical chassis of the MacPro not being on a conventional computer frame, then again, that is a bad analogy since a body-on-frame chassis on a truck directly affects the towing and load capability of a truck, which is not so with computers. You can have your components scattered across the floor and they would perform just as well as in a conventional chassis.
There's no use in a truck with a bed cover that's locked into place and unremovable. There's equally no use in a truck that's not built body-on-frame, and the Mac, one of my favorite computing platforms, is moving away from it.