On his recent trip to America, Charlie Stross unfortunately discovered at the airport that, in the bustle of getting packed to head overseas, he had managed to forget his laptop. And he’d left his iPad and even his Bluetooth keyboard for his iPhone behind as well, since he wasn’t going to need them with the laptop around.
But he found a novel solution:
My wife, being sensible, hadn’t left her laptop at home; rather than arm-wrestle with her for it, I bought an entry-level iPad on a buy-it-now-and-eBay-it-later basis. (An entry-level iPad (16Gb, no 3G) currently costs around £100 (or US $160) less in the USA than back home in the UK.) Despite my minimalism crusade I hadn’t left my laptop’s backup hard drive behind: so I borrowed her machine and used the backup drive to provision the iPad. With DropBox and Gmail set up, I now had access to all my work files and to my email — now all I had to worry about is how to dispose of a spare iPad. (Note: it’s not actually going to eBay — it’s already earmarked for a relative.)
As much as I like my iPad, I would probably have bought a small netbook or even laptop in that situation—you can get a decent one for under $500, the basic iPad’s list price. (The laptop that my family gave me for Christmas last year and with which I’m really happy only cost about $350.) And those come with real keyboards, and the ability to use Stross’s backup drive directly. But on the other hand, I’m not Charlie Stross; if he was happy with that solution, that’s the only thing that really matters. And he does like the iPad quite a lot.
Perhaps more interesting than the iPad’s ability to rescue Stross from lack of laptop is his use of cloud-based utilities in conjunction with it. Like Stross, I too keep my writing work in my Dropbox, so I can access it wherever I should happen to be, and I use Gmail as well. While I don’t think I could embrace the cloud to the point where I could use a fully-cloud-based OS like ChromeOS, you don’t need to go that far to find utility in keeping your information in the net—a half-and-half OS like Jolicloud works just fine, or even just plain Windows.
