Reasons I won’t get an iPad

There are many, but here are a few.

• It’s an Apple product, and these days, buying anything from Apple seems to mean you’re surrendering your ability to think independently about the true quality and value of a product.
• There’s absolutely nothing I can do on an iPad that I can’t do on my laptop.
• You need one hand to hold the darn thing if you’re using it in a place without tables.  So, that means in the great majority of instances that I’d use an iPad, I would only be able to use it with one hand.  That strikes me as really, really annoying.
• There’s absolutely nothing I can do on an iPad that I can’t do on my laptop.
• It doesn’t seem to me that an iPad is nearly as versatile as a laptop because you’re forced to work in Apple’s walled-off-garden OS.  I don’t want my productivity to be limited by whether some developer happens to have created an app that I need.
• There’s absolutely nothing I can do on an iPad that I can’t do on my laptop.  Seriously, I’m not trying to be cute about this (well, maybe I am a little bit) but as I see it, the iPad simply cannot be as revolutionary as the iPhone because, unlike the iPhone, it’s really not changing mobile computing in a groundbreaking way.  There may be a very narrow niche for the iPad to fill, but really the most it brings is a fresh look to mobile computing, and functionally it doesn’t supplant laptops.

So, there you have it.  Like all of Apple’s products, it looks nice, and it has interesting uses.  But so far, I’ve only seen one of these in the wild, so maybe the masses are agreeing with me.