If money were no object – would I buy an iPad?

Let’s just begin by saying that I have purchased Apple products in the past. I’ve owned an iMac, an eMac, several iPod Nanos, a MacBook and an iPod Classic. To me, they are the masters of hardware design and some of their software is also excellent (the iPhone/iPod Touch OS and Keynote being two outstanding examples for me – on the other hand Quicktime and iTunes are amongst my least favourite pieces of software, right up there with Adobe Reader). My loathing of iTunes and my discovery of how liberating it is to have a plain, vanilla MP3 player, buy MP3s from Amazon and simply drag and drop them across has led to my abandonment of the iPod series, for now at least.

As a geek but not an early adopter, it’s people like me that Apple needs to impress if it’s to increase its market share. Apple evangelists will buy the iPad, even if they don’t really know why and I don’t doubt they’ll find uses for it (even if it’s annoying other commuters by watching “Love Actually” on their lovely big screen) but people like me need a justifiable reason for laying out the money.

So, if money were no object, what would I buy in the following categories?

SMARTPHONE

I would buy: an iPhone

The iPhone was and is a game-changing device. Many of the apps are of high quality and, once 3G support was introduced, it offered truly liberated browsing and pseudo-computing.

What I actually bought: an HTC Magic running Android

Why? Just look at the figures. When I was choosing my next phone (my first smartphone having been a Sony-Ericsson user for a few generations), the cost of owning an iPhone was an £80 upfront payment and then a 24 month contract at £45 per month. This equates to a total cost of ownership of around £1,150 over 2 years.

My Magic, on the other hand, cost zero for the handset on a 18 month contract at £25 per month for a total cost of ownership of around £450. Android has proven a joy to use and I’ve already enjoyed 2 updates. It’s closely integrated (of course) with Google’s applications so for web use it’s ideal. And, of course, you don’t have to close one application to use another.

LAPTOP

I would buy: a Macbook Pro

…running Windows 7. I bought my first Macbook when they moved over to Intel chips and therefore became capable of running Windows. Windows 7 (and, to be honest, also Windows Vista) are nice, usable and productive operating systems and the choice of software for me, as a developer, is many times what it is under OSX.

What I actually bought: an Acer Laptop from Tesco

Why? Again, price. The 15 inch MacBook Pro starts at £1,328. The Acer Laptop cost £349 to which I would need to add £50 or so for an upgrade to Windows 7. What, in practice, does the MacBook Pro offer that makes it worth around 4x the price. And just to be clear, the technical specification of the Acer is very similar to the MacBook Pro.

DESKTOP

I would buy: Chillblast Fusion Midgard (£896 inc VAT)

This is PCPro’s current A list Desktop PC with a blistering benchmark score of 2.48 (3.2GHz Pentium D = 1)

What I actually bought: A cheap Dell Studio with a Quad Core processor (£299)

Runs my applications perfectly quickly. I play games on my PS3 so I don’t need game playing capability.

NETBOOK

I would buy: Samsung NC series Netbook (around £300 incl VAT)

…and this was what I actually bought. What a lovely little device. Excellent keyboard, nice bright display, around 7 hours of battery and a good rugged feel.

I guess this is the category the iPad could most obviously compete in. Except that it doesn’t have:

• a keyboard – software keyboards are NO replacement for a real one
• a webcam (are you having a laugh?)
• any protection for the screen
• a card reader so I can import my photos
• USB (!!!!)

…and it costs more than twice as much. The fact is that the iPad cannot replace a laptop or a phone. It’s only possible place is in the netbook market and it cannot compete there on either features or price. It is a lovely product, technologically very clever but its market (beyond Apple disciples) isn’t obvious to me. It’s too fragile to be used in education and not suitable for typing extensively on. I can see that if I were giving a presentation, it would be great to load it up on the iPad and then simply connect it to the projector and use the iPad as a controller. But I won’t spend £650 for this, very minor, benefit.

Sorry Apple, I simply cannot get excited by it. If you offered me an iPhone at a reasonable price I’d bite your arm off. If you offered me a Mac Mini, I’d have it and install Windows 7. If you offered me an iPad I’d politely decline.