This certainly falls under the category of ‘has been covered elsewhere a thousand times,’ but it also falls under the category ‘top ten questions to ask Michael.’ So here’s my answer:
Depends!
And you thought this was going to be short and sweet.
First, if you love gadgets and are made of money, there’s no point in waiting around. Get one today, and buy an extra for me as well.
On the other hand, if you aren’t made of money, you have some questions to answer about yourself. How do you primarily use a computer? People tend to fall into two broad categories:
1) Write email, check email, surf the web, view Microsoft Office documents, play music, look at pictures.
2) Creating relatively (or very) complex documents, editing files of all types, five bajillion songs, six bajillion photos, and simply must use program X.
A common misconception is that type 1 is the ‘novice’ or ‘light’ user which is true if you want to classify 90% of users as ‘novice’ or ‘light.’ Many people never do anything for work other than communicating or reading documents, and they are still getting critical work done. So it’s not how ‘serious’ you are; it’s what type of work you do. We can break it down further, and get a lot more controversial by generalizing between creating content and consuming it.
It’s around about here that the hue and cry will go up that you can create any kind of content on an iPad, and do it well. Indeed, people paint, edit video and record/edit music, among a great many other things, and they like it.
But a question you have to ask yourself there is ‘How much do I like change?’, because the more set you are in your traditional computing ways, the more risk you run. Refusal to change, is, of course, a horrible reason to avoid something new – and frequently, the change is superior to a degree as to trump whatever discomfort you feel in adopting it. That’s glaringly true with consuming content on an iPad – virtually everyone I have ever set up with an iPad has ended up curled up with it in minutes, regardless of how computer savvy they are, happily reading, watching, or typing away. (It’s really easy to type on an iPad by the way: both on the on-screen keyboards and on the many, many keyboards you can attach.) It’s not quite as glaringly true for creating content, though – it’s different, and sometimes it’s better, and frequently it’s not, and even more frequently it might be better but only because it’s significantly simpler and lacks the robust features your computer variant would have. And finally, it’s incredibly dependent on whether the application you want to use has been intelligently adapted to a touch interface; being ‘touch’ has no relation to being ‘good’ any more than being a ‘program’ means it’s not ‘terrible’ on a computer. Just because ‘an app exists for that’ doesn’t mean that it should. Then again, a beautifully designed application can literally be a life altering tool, so that cuts both ways.
As is most often the case with technology issues, it becomes a question of whether you are talking yourself into a decision and feeling convinced you will somehow surmount all the many issues you are thinking of, or whether your choice is pretty clear but general worry and paranoia keeping making you fret about ‘what ifs.’ What ifs are usually not a problem – the beautiful thing about technology is that it is adaptable, and you can usually find a work-around to most problems that arise. But if there are concrete, definable issues, then accepting work-arounds as your reality right off the bat is a very hazardous road to go down. In other words, never try to shoe-horn a solution into a situation – they should match each other near perfectly, with the knowledge and acceptance that scenarios are constantly fluid, and change will be necessary down the road.
Which still hasn’t brought us to the upshot which is this: when all is said and done, the iPad kind of sucks when it comes to creating content and interacting with an office network. But for the average human being….
Apple claimed the device was ‘magical’ when they introduced it, and it’s a term that has been widely derided since then. You can see why – the iPad is essentially a 10-inch iPhone, and there really isn’t anything it does that other devices don’t already do. So on the surface, calling it ‘magical’ is a tough sell.
But there is something indefinable that happens to every client I have who has one: the computer becomes a dust covered tool in the corner of the house, and the iPad an instrument of gleeful enjoyment. This seems true no matter how advanced the users are. I see people having fun, which is massively satisfying for someone in my position.
Steve Jobs equated Macs to the pick up trucks of their offerings, with the iPhone and iPad being the commuter cars. This rule of thumb is strikingly accurate, but I would also add this: the iPad is the pocket-knife of the technology world.
Do you need one? It depends. But will you use it constantly if you have one? Definitely.