Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Why I’ve always wanted to buy an Apple iPad, but haven’t yet (and likely won’t)



I’m an Apple guy. My family first owned an Arche Deluxe 486 computer than I played Hooops, Mavis Beacon and Where in the world is Carmen SanDiego on. Our next computer was an iMac.

I’ve owned 3 Apple laptops (2 MacBooks, 1 MacBook pro), 2 iPods (original, Touch), and 2 iPhones (4, 5). I’ve gone through about 15 pairs of Apple earbuds. I’ve got various cables: Firewire to Firewire, Firewire to USB, USB to Apple connector, USB to Lightning, USB/Lightning adapter, wall chargers, battery packs, DVI to HDMI, Mini Display to HDMI, etc, etc, etc. All that to say, I love Apple and their products.

However, when it comes to the iPad, I just haven’t been able to justify the purchase. They’re quite costly as a secondary device ($600+), even for the Wi-Fi only versions.

Viewing video and pictures on the Retina screen would be amazing, but I’m not sure how much I really NEED to view those media types on the go.

I utilize the Microsoft Office suite a ton. Keynote and Pages are nice, but the lack of compatibility is a huge drawback. Working with Excel on the tablet is not much of an option, and a more difficult experience than on a laptop. This is really my biggest complaint with the iPad.

I already own a MacBook Pro and an iPhone 5. It’s hard to see where the iPad fits in between them. Both of my devices are portable, with great battery life. I do tons of reading on my iPhone (Twitter, Facebook, Flipboard, Summly, Pulse, Instapaper, Wikipedia, iBooks) and am fine with the screen size. If I really need to view content on a bigger screen, it’s easy to access Instapaper or starred tweets on my MBP.

I definitely agree that the iPad is fairly priced, very functional, and an amazing device. It just fulfills very few extra needs of mine when it comes to mobile computing. If my salary increases twofold I’ll likely pick up an iPad in a heartbeat. But currently, I’m very content with my two, incredible devices.

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