Buyers remorse and the iPad

[Mounds]

It's finally time to admit it: the iPad was a bad buy.

It's been slightly over a year that I've had it. At first, it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I was reading books, typing up thoughts, playing games, watching videos, and surfing the web. I wasn't exactly sure how it would fit into my life, but I was pretty confident it would happen.

Thirteen months later, it still doesn't fit into my life.

Here's a list of the problems:

- it's not an iPod. I'm not going to carry it around and listen to music.
- it's not really made for playing movies. Constantly having my head down watching a screen is just bad news.
- the flagship writing app, Pages, has a terrible filing system, no word count, and several other missing features.
- $35 a month for 5 GB of data. Fat chance.
- the games (with the exception of Plants vs Zombies), kinda suck. I have an XBox and it hammers the crap out of anything in the App Store.
- the only thing I really loved about it was reading (nice big screen). Only problem is that now I take most of my books from the library.

The final blow came this morning. I wanted to breathe new life into my unit so I started searching for the best apps. One app would let me stream videos from my computer, on my iPad. Another (FlipBoard) would aggregate my RSS feeds into an app that made it look like a magazine.

My apathy quickly soared to new heights, and I closed the window.

When this tablet dies, I will never buy another. This is a prime example of buying based on an idealized version of yourself. Apparently, the me I had in mind was a relentless consumer of popular media. Square peg, meet round hole.

-Tim