You might want to think about the 32GB version, even if you don’t think you’ll need it.
I never thought I would, but I find with the iPad, apps are a LOT easier to use and generally more useful than they are on the iPhone, and I found I wanted more of them. There’s quite a few cool cooking apps, for example - I find myself using Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything” app quite a bit. There are also cool apps for bird identification, music, all sorts of things.
If you think you might even be remotely interested in such things and you can afford it, go for the larger memory. I’m glad I did, and I would have thought I wouldn’t be too into apps at all before I got the thing and saw how useful some of them were.
Maybe I’m misremembering, but wasn’t there a fiasco with one of the iPhones? As in, they released one and everyone went out to buy it, then released another within 6 months or so, to much anger? There was a discount and a refund, as I recall.
Wait. I think I am misremembering. I think the big stink and discount and refunds occurred when those who had just bought an iPhone were suddenly left with something less than optimal when the 3G was released a few weeks later, even though there was a large gap between the two generations. And the big stink and refunds and such were due, in large part, to Apple’s secrecy.
And I’m wrong again: finally found it. The big stink and refunds occurred when Apple suddenly dropped the 4 gig iPhone and cut prices for all models pretty drastically. People who had just bought them, pre-price cut, were royally pissed. This was back in 2007. People got a $100 credit in the Apple store. And those who were pissed knew that it was largely their own fault, but they were still angry. And I’ll posit it was still caused by Apple’s super-secrecy.
How different is Apple from any other hardware manufacturer, in terms of secrecy? Does anyone else pre-announce new products? I would think not, since it would kill sales of their existing products.
Seriously. It pisses me off when companies improve their products. I want to know that when I buy something, no one will ever get to have something better than what I just got.
It depends on the market. Right now, companies are falling all over themselves to pre-announce tablets to compete with the iPad several months down the line. But, for the most part, they don’t actually have any existing products to kill the sales of. Their best case is that someone puts off buying an iPad to wait for the announced product. Listening to John Gruber, though, it appears that many of these companies don’t exactly have long-term strategy well in hand, though.
Apple releases a new iPhone, a new iPod touch, and now a new iPad every year. There is no mystery here and it isn’t “a couple of weeks” after the previous release.
Geez, you buy a computer from ANY manufacturer and it is basically obsolete a few months later, passed up by new models that are faster, cheaper, etc. This has been true since the dawn of technology. Whining about how you got screwed because you bought X and enjoyed it for N period only to have a new model come out is stupid and short sighted.
Before I got my iPad, I was thinking that I would use it mostly for occasional entertainment and messing around with apps, but now I’m thinking that I might just take it instead of my laptop when I travel for non-business reasons - it’s much lighter and I don’t have to drag around as many peripherals (cooling pad, humongous power cord, etc.) with it. I’ve gotten used to using the touch-screen keyboard for web/email purposes and I’ve started migrating some of the movies off of my laptop onto the iPad (after backing them up) to free up some space on the former. I’ve already burned through over half of the 64 GB on mine, and the majority of that is videos with apps coming a distant second.
IMO, like other people have said, it’s not a bad idea to consider getting more storage space than you think you need. It would take a lot of apps to fill up 16 GB (and the ones that take up the most space tend to be the flashier game apps), but if you should happen to get into downloading videos or storing photos, 16 GB is not that much space. The worst part is that you can’t go back later and upgrade the hard drive like you can with an actual computer.