- Joined
- Sep 28, 2011
- Messages
- 29
- Reaction score
- 1
- Points
- 3
- Location
- Oregon
- Your Mac's Specs
- 1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GiB RAM, 80 GiB hard drive, Intel GMA 950, SuperDrive
I bought myself an iPad 2 about six months ago. I vowed that I would never do it, but I knew a few people who'd gotten one and I fell for the Apple magic. Obviously, because I'm a starving student without a whole lot of cash to spare, I had to make some sacrifices to get it. And because I was so caught up in that new-Apple-product enthusiasm, I decided to sell my Windows laptop and my Kindle 3G to get it. "It will do everything those things do!" I confidently asserted to everyone who would listen.
Don't get me wrong, I love my iPad, and I wouldn't trade back down to a Kindle for the world. But it definitely doesn't do everything a laptop can do - even a Windows laptop. When school started up again, it became an incredible hassle to do any kind of work away from the computer lab. I couldn't save files to a flash drive, access some of my classes' pages, or watch the hopelessly outdated WMV movies; printing a file involved ten minutes' work, uploading and downloading and converting on the decade-old Optiplexes.
I got a four-years-old Mac mini for practically nothing, which eased the problems somewhat, but now I feel like I have two devices doing what one could do before. I just use the iPad to walk around browsing the web and reading Flipboard or Zite; for everything else, I sit down at my desk or remote in with PocketCloud. So I'm really starting to wonder if selling both of these devices and upgrading to a MacBook wouldn't be the best idea. I can get a MacBook Air for $799 or a MacBook Pro for $929; the profits would just about cover it. And I'm almost certainly getting an iPod touch for Christmas, which will do the whole "walk around reading" thing (although I will admittedly miss the bigger screen!)
This was mostly just my brainstorming, but any thoughts or conclusive arguments either way would be helpful. :S
Don't get me wrong, I love my iPad, and I wouldn't trade back down to a Kindle for the world. But it definitely doesn't do everything a laptop can do - even a Windows laptop. When school started up again, it became an incredible hassle to do any kind of work away from the computer lab. I couldn't save files to a flash drive, access some of my classes' pages, or watch the hopelessly outdated WMV movies; printing a file involved ten minutes' work, uploading and downloading and converting on the decade-old Optiplexes.
I got a four-years-old Mac mini for practically nothing, which eased the problems somewhat, but now I feel like I have two devices doing what one could do before. I just use the iPad to walk around browsing the web and reading Flipboard or Zite; for everything else, I sit down at my desk or remote in with PocketCloud. So I'm really starting to wonder if selling both of these devices and upgrading to a MacBook wouldn't be the best idea. I can get a MacBook Air for $799 or a MacBook Pro for $929; the profits would just about cover it. And I'm almost certainly getting an iPod touch for Christmas, which will do the whole "walk around reading" thing (although I will admittedly miss the bigger screen!)
This was mostly just my brainstorming, but any thoughts or conclusive arguments either way would be helpful. :S