Apple iPad – Is the laptop is finished?
The iPad is Apple’s biggest success to date. Powerful, portable and able to run all day on battery power, the tablet computer is currently selling a million units per month – and if you believe the hype, there’s nothing it can’t do.It plays music, TV programmes and films, works as an e-book reader, an emailer and an internet browser, and you can expand it still further with one of the tens of thousands of applications, or “apps”, available in the iTunes App Store.
Given the choice between an iPad and a laptop or netbook, you’d be crazy not to go for the Apple device. Wouldn’t you?Pricing
The truth is that while the iPad is an extraordinarily clever bit of kit, there are plenty of reasons not to buy one. The biggest one is probably price: at £429 for the most basic version and a whopping £699 for the most powerful one, it’s considerably more expensive than almost all netbooks and most decent laptops too. £429 would buy you a very good laptop such as a
Sony Vaio EB or
Dell Studio 15, or you could buy two
Toshiba NB200 netbooks and still have money left over.
That price isn’t all you’ll pay, either. If you want to do proper typing you’ll need a wireless keyboard or Apple’s own Keyboard Dock, which is £55; if you want to transfer photos to it from your digital camera, you’ll need the £25 Camera Connection Kit; and if you want to keep it safe then cases start at £30.
If you want to use the 3G mobile phone network to download things while you’re out and about then you’ll also need a more expensive iPad – the cheapest 3G-enabled model is £529 – and you’ll need to pay for the 3G coverage too. Different networks have slightly different prices but you should expect to pay £2 per day or £10 – plus per month.
Limitations
Money isn’t the only thing to think about, though. That shiny screen is effectively useless in bright sunshine, so if you want something electronic to read on the beach Amazon’s Kindle or Sony’s Reader are better bets. There’s no camera, so you can’t use it for video chat. Its web browser doesn’t support Adobe’s Flash technology, so you can’t use it to play browser based games written in Flash. It doesn’t have much storage, especially the cheapest models, and you can’t play CDs or DVDs.
The biggest difference, though, is that in its current incarnation the iPad is all about consuming content, not creating it. It’s great at playing videos but you can’t edit your home movies on it; Pages, its word processor, lacks important features such as word count – essential for writers and students – and actually strips things such as footnotes from documents you open in it, and while there is a growing number of Office-style applications for the iPad none of them come close to what Microsoft Office can do. Admittedly netbooks can’t do all of that – they’re not powerful enough for video editing – but they do run Microsoft Office and they don’t cost upwards of £499.
Next Version?
The main reason not to buy the iPad, though, is that it’s version one of a product. The original iPhone was overpriced, underpowered and lacked key features including copy, cut and paste. Price cuts, more power and better features soon followed – as they will with the iPad.
