Is The New Apple iPad Worth it?

It's gorgeous, it's sexy, It's thin (you can never be too rich or too thin), but is it worth it? Well, let me answer that in a roundabout way:

In the late seventies and early eighties, when computers had a couple of kilobytes of RAM and programs had to be loaded off cassettes each time you booted the computer, I attended a class about computers at a community college in Raleigh, North Carolina. The professor asked what would be a reasonable amount of storage and memory for a personal computer if everyone had their druthers. Someone answered, "500 Gigabytes of hard drive and four Gigabytes of memory." The professor got angry and shot back, "That's ridiculous." The student replied, "That depends on how personal you want to get."

So arguably, the merits of the iPad are relative to your wants and needs. I argue that it has more to do with wants than needs. If a basic book reader with built-in wi-fi and 3G is all you want, look no further than the Amazon Kindle, for less than $260. Sure, it's black and white and it is much smaller than an iPad, but the most basic iPad without 3G costs almost twice as much. Better yet, buy a cheap netbook for under $300, and run the Kindle app on it: you'll get a heck of a lot more than 16 Gigabytes storage capacity, along with all the other things you can do with a PC, that you can't do with an iPad or a Kindle.

Some netbooks, some of them about the same price as an iPad with 32 Gigabytes of storage, even have HDMI outputs and if you buy a Blu-Ray player attachment, enough graphics card internally to show a movie through a large-screen TV (make sure you have a type 2, v1.3 HDMI cable, or you won't see 1080P). 3G is available in most new netbooks, and wi-fi is standard in just about all modern PCs of any kind.

And apps? Well, if the apps you can buy for iPad are the prime reason you buy the device, it is definitely a wonderful toy: gaming galore, iPhone apps already on your iPhone can be synced to the iPad (oh, you don't have an iPhone? Bummer…), and you can find your car or a restaurant, or read the Wall Street Journal or E*TRADE, only bigger.

If you're on a budget, and you don't need the Apple apps, buy a netbook with the right battery life and capability and dongles, bells and whistles: $500 or less.

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