I will admit I have been obsessing about the iPad for months now.  I always do this with bigger purchases.  I read review after review and ponder and ruminate and speculate.  Usually I end up doing nothing at all and living in envy of people who actually spend money.

I had two laptops for years and one broke recently giving me a perfect excuse to at least think about this.  I can come up with plenty of rationale for the iPad buy.  "It is cool."  "I want an e-book reader."  "It has great battery life"  "I can watch Netflix on it in bed without a tangle of cables for the laptop that overheats or runs out of power in an hour."

I don't have any preconceived notions.  I know this is more of a consumption device than a productivity thing, and that is exactly the problem.



Here is my son playing a very cool looking pinball game on the iPad.  At $499 it is baiting me in as a decent media viewer and light gaming device.  It is not the perfect one, it is not the perfect e-reader either.  But it is just good enough in all sorts of areas to stay stuck in my frontal lobe.



My kids fight over everything, and I am not about to get two of these things to appease them.  In fact, they would end up fighting me for it.  I can see myself blowing hour after hour on it.  How do I know this?  Because I spend hour after hour on my laptop.

Two days ago at the peak of our recent heatwave in California I came home from a live shot for a dinner break and opened up the laptop to post more stories about the heat, I promised my girlfriend it would be just one story and then I would turn it off.  When I was done, I somehow got lured into checking e-mails and feedback and Facebook.  She reminded me I had literally been on the computer all day, and she was right.

That is the problem with the iPad.  It is too good.  It'll be one of those things that'll need to be on all the time, like my smart-phone.  I am headed into the computing abyss.  I am not saying I am not going to get one of these, I probably will at some point.  I will just do it knowing I am one step closer to becoming a binary zombie.

I need a device that lets me read something, but doesn't distract my attentions to the millions of other factoids, tweets, status updates and other digital eye candy.  Oh, you know what, I think I heard of such a thing.  I think it is called a paperback.  I will probably get one of those first.