I bought an iPad. And here is why
I was considering buying an iPad for many years and I even had one, but that device was mostly an entertaining screen for kids and occasionally used for watching movies.
Over the years iOS for iPad was slowly evolving and each year tiny features were added to iOS specifically for tablets. Then back in 2019 iPadOS came out. From the iOS developer perspective, renaming iOS to iPadOS was not a big deal since we know that not many things were actually changed. But what is more important, for that moment was a lot of these small changes. Adding trackpad/mouse support, introduction Magic Keyboard, USB Type-C port, and other small steps made believe customers that they can adapt their workflows to work on iPad instead of using a laptop. All previous advantages of iPad like split view, dock, etc. even increased this feeling.
Several years ago I was pretty skeptical about the iPad lineup future, I was sure that most of the customers use iPad as an additional “bedroom Netflix” device or universal “kids please do not bother me for an hour” device. But nowadays I see more and more people on YouTube are sharing their workflows where the iPad plays a key role. They moved most of the work tasks there and they don’t want to come back. Of course, there are still a lot of drawbacks with this approach, not everything works seamlessly, but the pros are bigger than the cons.
So nowadays I’m pretty sure in a strong future for tablet devices. But let’s go back to the idea of buying the device.
Reasons why I needed it
I’m a kid. And each kid needs its own toys to play with. And because of my nerd nature, electronics is a perfect toy for me. Sad to realize that most of my goals are pretty expensive. But at least I make such spendings 1–2 times per year.
Another reason is that we need to have one more computer at home. I have 3 kids and for the whole family, we have only 1 MacBook so it is often hard to share this device especially nowadays when modern kids do a lot of learning by using education platforms on the web. We realized that iPad can be the most convenient way to solve this issue rather than buying any laptop.
Which one should I buy?
The idea to buy an iPad came to my head in a month after iPad 4 was introduced. Before iPad Air 4 was introduced the most perfect iPad for me personally was iPad Pro. The design of this device was so modern in comparison to all previous models. So I was understanding that iPad Pro is way too expensive, but all previous models were just not as fancy. Also, one of the things that separate these generations was Apple Pencil support. At that moment I was pretty sure that Apple Pencil 2 is the only choice nowadays. And then iPad Air 4 came out…
I probably need to write another article about iPad Air 4 and iPad Pro comparison since it is a quite big topic, but just to sum up, most of its downsides are not that critical for me. The biggest issue was that the cheapest iPad Air has 64Gb of internal memory and since this device would be used by everyone across the family it can be a bummer. But since 256Gb is way too expensive, we decided that we can live with the starting model.
What’s next?
Hope to have a willingness and desire to write more articles about direct comparison with PRO models (at least on paper since I don’t have it in my hands), accessories, and apps that can be useful for iPad users. Also, have a hope to start drawing on it. For 35 years I was сonvincing myself that I cannot draw. Probably, it is the perfect time to deal with this issue :)
