Everything's Beta

I got a nice little surprise yesterday from my girlfriend; a 32GB iPad. And, now that I’ve played with it, I think I understand why it’s such a great device. Yeah, I know, it doesn’t have X amount of RAM, Y input ports, and is a closed system etcs. I, too, scoffed at this “crippled” device and bemoaned various things missing that, if only they were present, would make it BE-AWESOME.

But, after owning it for a day+ish, I think I get where I was wrong. The reason I, and many others, get mired in these comparisons is because we think that the iPad is meant to be a smaller laptop. It’s not. Whereas, on a laptop you can do both content creation and consumption, the iPad is primarily a content consumption device; you can watch movies, play games, listen to music, read books, but you really can’t edit or create anything of the sort.

And that’s perfectly fine. Think of it as a TV on steroids, rather than a downsized laptop. For lots of people, especially during their personal time, content generation really isn’t what they spend time doing. Despite this, the average computer is designed more for content generation than consumption.

If you think you are primarily a producer rather than a consumer, you may be surprised. I know I was. I went through the entire weekend, reading books, checking email etc. on my new iPad without missing my laptop in the least. Yeah, I need my laptop to code and I could never be without one, but the iPad fills a lot of gaps I lug my laptop around for.

A side effect of having a consumption only device is that now I can manage my time better. While I am on my laptop, I may be on hacker news or reddit for hours before realizing how much time I have wasted. However, by restricting the consumption activities to my iPad and productive ones to my laptop, I find it a lot easier to get more done

TL;DR: If you don’t think the iPad is great, then you probably don’t get it. You may need to get it to get it.

P.S: No, I dont think I am suffering from the Stockholm syndrome.