Keep taking the tablets: Apple's new iPad range.
The
new iPad cannot move me. My old
iPad was stolen a year ago and, for the life of me, I can't think why I thought I ever needed one.
One year ago this week, I was visiting London and having drinks in a bar popular with local office workers. High ceilings, ambient low lights, the jostling of besuited office workers. But in Covent Garden, there's a breed of worker who are really artists: pickpockets. Cunning and light-fingered, they create barely a breeze as they clean you out of every moderately valuable thing you own.
This pickpocket, invisible to us, lifted the flap of my closed messenger bag and took two items: my iPad and my old iPod. No common thief, he: a day later, he or one of his customers informed my friends via very polite emails that I was no longer in possession of the device. He left my
iPhone in my bag, a kind of wink of both discernment and decency – a gentlemanly touch that has me, to this day, picturing him as a rather dashing, rogueish figure, like the Scarlet Pimpernel, sweeping through central London. He probably looked more like an accountant from Croydon, like everyone else in the bar, but I prefer the more romantic vision.
In any case, he helped himself to my entire life. My iPad had my credit card numbers, passport number, sensitive contact lists, work emails, and my itineraries. It had also become an alternative to my laptop, allowing me to peck out emails while at coffee shops. In fact, it made me seek out coffee shops just so I could sit with my iPad, daydreaming and looking at maps.
Its loss also made my bag quite a bit lighter. As a journalist, I had become used to toting around a satellite's worth of iDevices – mainly because anything made by
Apple, while adorable, had the battery life of a potato hooked up with a wire. They were always running out of power quickly and I kept the others as backups to take photographs or record meetings.
In the end, however, the iPad figured little in my regrets.
It was the loss of the iPod that stung me more; it predated my iPhone and held more precious photos, as well as being a useful way to ignore other people on the Tube. I was also slightly embarrassed that the thief might find my eclectic choice in music – Mozart here, Flo-Rida there – perplexing. In keeping with my vision of him, I pictured him chortling with amused sophistication over my playlists at his club while swirling an amber sherry in a large glass. He would talk about erasing all of my laboriously downloaded songs, and he would consider it a mercy.
At first, I thought that losing my iPad would be painful. It held a wealth of personal information – none of it, of course, backed up to the cloud. I used it as a
Kindle, reading magazines and books and using it for Twitter and Facebook. It was a laptop in a pinch, and, better than a laptop, never slowed down airport security, although the attached keyboard made it heavy and not as pleasing as it was on its own. I paid richly to keep it connected to the internet, so I didn't have to beg for Wi-Fi in strange places, as I did with the iPod and laptop. I watched movies and TV shows on it, and it was indispensable for fiddling around for boring hours on a plane.
What surprised me was that losing my iPad – or, at least, having it stolen – was actually liberating.
I no longer paid a full extra phone bill every month to keep it connected to 3G. I read books on my Kindle, which was lighter and had a battery life longer than the lifespan of a gnat. I tweeted on my iPhone and watched videos on my laptop.
But mostly, I stopped jumping to my iPad whenever I had a moment of boredom. I did other things instead of resorting to that electronic pacifier every time I wanted to block the world out or didn't want to be where I was.
After a few weeks without the iPad, I wondered why I ever thought I needed one. It seemed not only extraneous, but decadent. I went back to my laptop. Typing on a regular keyboard, as opposed to the off-brand doohickeys sold for the iPad, was a relief, and it made my reporting and writing easier. Email was not so important that I had to haul out an entire separate device to manage it: between my computers at work and home and the iPhone, communications were well handled. No one ever asked why they couldn't find me.
But
seeing the new iPad itself left me cold. The shiny bezel, the retina display, the
apps … it was still the old iPad, albeit lighter and with a snazzier makeover. I still can't think of any reason why it's essential, or even important, to my life.
For all the uses to which I would put it, it was too expensive a toy. iPads are so common now, despite their price, that they no longer confer importance or prestige; they're about as glamorous as bluetooth headsets. And they still run out of battery life fast, keeping people tethered to their chargers or outlets. For that kind of trouble, I'd rather be fueling up an iPhone. Or better yet, reading for days and days unbothered on my Kindle.
The Scarlet Pimpernel of Covent Garden long ago sold my iPad and spent the money. He's welcome to it. I've had nothing but peace ever since.
