Even though, this morning, I didn’t know they were out today…
And even though, less than half an hour before I told JAF I wasn’t going to get one…
…I bought an iPad Air today 🙂
After a few hours of use, here’s five “why the Air is better than my old iPad 2” observations:
1) It’s much, much faster doing just about anything. Powering on, starting apps, using the internet. This last one surprised me a bit since I figured the slowness was the network lag, but this beast loads webpages and checks email like there’s no tomorrow. In addition, certain games that were sluggish on the iPad 2 are much more playable now.
2) The retina screen is incredible. Of course I’m used to it on my phone, and of course iPads have had retina screens for ages now (since iPad 3), but I had chosen to ignore this since my old iPad didn’t have one 🙂
3) It’s much lighter and much thinner than any previous iPad. This is why they are calling it the ‘air’, and it’s a bit incredible to have an iPad that is both thinner and lighter than my phone. It’s hard to believe tablets could get much thinner than this.
4) It uses all the features of iOS 7. If you are using an iPad 2, certain features of Apples latest OS are disabled. This irked me a bit, since iOS 7 seemed a bit more complete on my phone than on my old iPad. No such problem on the Air.
5) Battery life seems better. I haven’t plugged it in yet. It was 99% out of the box and now after many hours which included downloading a 18GB backup from the cloud, it’s at 78%. Either it’s just flat out better, or my old iPad had an aging battery (which is very possible).
Needless to say despite the fact that I had no plans or expectation to buy this, I’m very happy with my purchase. For a device I use every single day, I think it was a good time for a big upgrade!