Apple recently announced a pair of brand new iPads. Updates to long-standing fan favorites for both variants, ushering in a brand new iPad mini and a new iPad Air. Both of these models proved popular enough in their own right over the years, ever since they were first introduced years ago. The iPad mini probably had a bit of a harder time than the others, but, here in 2019, Apple showed us all that people out there must be fans of this small tablet.
I just so happen to be one of them. And yet I’m not going to buy one.
The easiest reason behind my lack of picking one up is that I need a keyboard on my iPad. This is a requirement. I used to buy iPads for the stylus support, especially when the Apple Pencil arrived, but it quickly became all too obvious to me that the stylus wasn’t a vital reason for me to own a tablet. An expensive one to boot.
The iPad mini was my favorite iPad when it first launched. The size is fantastic. It’s exceedingly portable, the screen’s great (especially now), and it can get the job done for what it needs to: read books, comics, jot down notes, and consume media. It does all of those things well, and I’m sure that the brand new variant will do all of those things even better.
Especially now that Apple has brand new subscription services, like Apple News+, to consume media.
Before I purchased my iPad Pro, the 11-inch model, I made a deal with myself: I’d be keeping this tablet for three years, and I would use it every day. Not to play games on it, either. (At the time of publication, I don’t have any installed on it at all. That will change when Apple Arcade launches, though.) I wanted the iPad to be an actual productivity tool, something I’ve always seen it as but have never actually followed through with in the past.
If I use the thing every day then I can justify the price (and monthly payments). But it’s always been a sticking point for me in the past, and why, despite always wanting a tablet, I’ve ever really found a need for one. I’m going to change that this time around. This is going to be a daily driver for me, dang it.
I don’t see a lot of tablets out there in the wild. In my random stops at coffee shops and what not, it’s typically always a laptop. Though, I have seen some Microsoft Surface machines once or twice, so those would count as a tablet. That isn’t to say that I’ve never seen an iPad being used in what some might consider its natural habitat. It’s just typically a MacBook of some kind that I see.
Maybe if I start bringing my tablet with me more often, I’ll start seeing more of them in the wild, too. But, before that happens, I’m curious: Do you use your tablet every single day? And, if so, what are you typically using it for? Getting some work done in some capacity, or is it mainly a content consumption device? Or are you on the other side of the coin, where your tablet goes mostly unused? Let me know!
