To iPad or not to iPad

Yesterday (Monday, June 14, 2010; Flag Day) I tagged along with my wife into Rochester to eat lunch with two guys she once worked with.
One is recently retired; the other still works, but at a different employer.
The younger guy was gonna bring along his recently purchased iPad.
“Looks like the whole reason you’re here,” the older guy said to me; “is to see that iPad.”
“Yep,” I said. “Do I wanna pursue an iPad or not.......”
The younger guy had dialed his iPad into a nearby Wendy’s wireless Internet connection.
It was displaying the menu of the restaurant we were in.
“This restaurant has wi-fi too, but Wendy’s is much faster.”
“So how much hard-drive does that thing have?” I asked.
“It doesn’t have a hard-drive; it’s not a computer.”
“Well, I’m processing photos, and cranking stuff into a word-processor. I need lotsa RAM.”
“You can get applications, but they hafta be specific to the iPad.
“Can it be a cellphone?” my wife asked.
“No.”
“Well what is it?” we asked.
“You surf the Internet with it, and do your e-mail.”
“In which case it ends every e-mail with ‘done from my iPad,’” my wife observed.
“I need more than that,” I said. “What if I wanna process a video?
I just got a refurbished MacBook Pro laptop,” I said. “The main reason I did was portability. My previous machine was a tower.
The reason I was interested in an iPad is it looks more portable than my laptop.”
We fired up a Google satellite-view. Finger touches to the display-screen zoomed in and moved it around.
We put the iPad down.
All-of-a-sudden the display flipped 90 degrees.
“That would drive me crazy,” I said.
“I haven’t got around to turning that off,” the younger guy said.
PASS!

• My wife of 42+ years is “Linda.” She retired as a computer programmer.