Because I need a distraction from all this other bullshit, I’m looking at my gadgetry again. So bear with me.
After some donking around with various laptops, I have come to the conclusion that while the 11″ MacBook Air may be the perfect laptop for me, it’s not really compatible with work. The fact is, I need 1440×900 for proper use of Apple Remote Desktop, and a 5-hour battery (probably more like 4) won’t get it done. So any future work laptop would need to be the 13″ MacBook Air at a minimum.
This brings me back to the idea of the 13″ MBA for work plus the iPad for personal use. Only problem is I still can’t really use the iPad for ESPN3, or reading thousand-comment threads on EDSBS, or posting to some of my blogs. But some of that can be done through the web browser (and presumably in private mode) so as long as I *have* the laptop I can still get by. But I’m definitely counting on iCloud to make it a lot easier to live with a desktop and an iPhone.
Meanwhile, the Kindle is still great for text reading, but not that hot for browsing anything other than Google Reader. Nevertheless, the fact is, it’s free – and as much as it would not suck to have a 3G-enabled iPad for travel, I’m not sure I want to splash out on exorbitant rates for that access. Much easier to stick with the iPhone where you’re already paying for 3G as a matter of course. But it would sure be nice to have that big iPad screen for maps, and GPS to boot.
And today I wandered into work without my power supply for the laptop. Not very reliable without a place to plug in. And I can’t really fail over to the Kindle for anything workwise, so it’s got to be the iPhone until further notice. Huh.
But the iPad is so much easier than a laptop to just pull out and read, and it runs rings around the Kindle for the viewing of PDFs – hell, runs rings around the Kindle speedwise anyway, and so much easier to use at bedtime. And from a battery life standpoint, beats any laptop…and definitely cheaper to spend $730 on a 32 GB iPad than $1200 on an above-vanilla 11″ MBP.
The thing is, we normally expect to squeeze 3-4 years out of a laptop. At this point, I don’t know that it’ll be feasible to squeeze more than two years from a tablet. Now if the tablet is half the price of the laptop, maybe that’s reasonable, but we’re sort of through the looking glass on the future of mobility computing and I don’t know what the new normal is for expected lifespan of devices, especially with the two-year timeframe of mobile phones as the reference point.
And yes, we are squarely back in the “I want to need the things I want” mode. Look, I’m of redneck stock, count your blessings that it’s gadgets and not guns. Oh look, there we go again…well, it was worth a shot.