Snippet: The Increasingly Rare iPad Deal Killers ☇

David Sparks:

Jason Snell wrote an excellent piece today about how he uses his iPad for a lot of his work. The post references a recent quote from Microsoft’s Satya Nadella that implies the iPad is not a real computer and a recent iPad ad that makes its point nicely.

I’ve spent a lot of time writing and podcasting about the iPad as a potential laptop replacement. In the early days, I went iPad only while writing the book, iPad at Work. Back then it was rough. The hardware, operating system, and software were all in need of improvement. Things did, however, get better. iPad hardware these days benchmarks alongside currently shipping Macs very respectively.

This is a pretty fascinating analysis, especially when you consider that the little things where an iPad does fall flat are often nitpick niche cases. In my experience, PC users are quick to point out Microsoft Office, but for the day-to-day stuff I do, Word and Excel on the iPad are sufficient (Pages and Numbers probably would, if I wasn’t going to mess with importing and exporting files I’d share). Other than that, there’s a few Flash-based sites and some other fussy legacy things that I would love to see go away anyway.