Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 3 July 2010

A fortnightly column on technology and the web

issue 03 July 2010

In the end I ignored my own advice and bought an Apple iPad, purely, as I explained to my wife, ‘for the purposes of research’. The very same ‘research’ that has by now filled two or three desk drawers with a ridiculous assortment of electrical chargers, the devices they once charged mostly lost, burnt out or forgotten.

Weeks later, my verdict on the thing is curiously complicated. What I mean by this is that the Apple iPad is a magnificent, life-enhancing device, which in many ways lights a future path for technology… and I really do like it: but I’m just not quite sure that you should buy one.

What Apple has undoubtedly proved is that a monolithic, connected, large touch-screen tablet with a wide choice of applications may be the ideal future format for personal computing. That’s the good news.

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