I got sucked back into the Steve Jobs reality distortion field (aka Apple) a number of years ago, and it's bad now. I was a full blow Mac guy until college was over in 2000. At that point it was in my best financial interest to go PC (as well as sanity - Apple was on the brink at the time, this was pre-Jobs coming back, pre-OSX and the constant stream of iGadgets was a glimmer in somebody's eye).
Over the last decade, I've followed along from a distance - noting that the price gap on PCs and laptops, while still quite large, was coming down. I dipped back into Apple products with an iPod circa 2004 (white one with the monochrome screen and the click wheel - seems so quaint now). Loved it, it was finally a way to keep a big chunk of my music library in one place. I've followed the evolution of the iPhone closely and finally dropped for one mid-last year when the timing of my Sprint contract expiration and the release of the iPhone 4 lined up quite nicely.
So low-and-behold, the iPad. A device that has turned from a "who would want a giant iPhone" to a gadget that I desire in the span of a year. I think part of that is that I'm already entrenched in the iOS sphere, so it's easier to go for. I have a personal laptop at home that's having screen issues - it still works fine as a computer if I plug it in to a monitor, but its days of being a surf on the couch device are probably over. Rather than buy a new laptop, I'm going to get an iPad 2 to be my surf and sit on the couch machine, and we'll see how that goes. My iPhone is already serving quite nicely in that capacity.
I kept an eye on news of the new model and considered waiting in line for one last Friday, but decided against it, since my vacation time at work is better spent on other things. I thought that perhaps I could wander into a store that weekend and get one, but I grossly underestimated demand. On a whim, I went to the Best Buy on my way home from work around 4:30pm, an hour before the units were to go on sale. There were not as many people waiting there as i thought there'd be and I was told that I might be able to get one, so I stuck around. Right around 5, they finally got to me with the tickets for the units they had left. Sadly, they had no AT&T 3G units left and that's what I wanted. Not wanting to get something else, I took off, still thinking there was an outside chance of Apple having them still. Thanks to the power of Twitter searches, I was able to determine that local Apple stores sold out quickly out of the model I wanted, and most were completely out by 8pm.
I ended up ordering online around 6pm the night of release, and I'm 2-3 weeks out, with a tenative delivery date of April 6th. Ok by me - would rather do that then try to track one down in stores for the next few months.
Pretty excited about this device as I think it will fit in nicely to my flow. I have an endless supply of articles to read in Instapaper, use Twitter a lot, and Google Reader via the excellent Reeder app for iOS.
If you want to be entertained by how obsessive people are about this thing, check this thread on Mac Rumors out. It's crazy. Some of them need a lot of perspective.
