iPad Air 2 Review

Greetings and Happy Holidays!

The other night, my wife, who has logged over 100,000 miles on her 4-year old iPad, noticed the screen was going insane and the top glass (which we previously had to repair due to a bottle falling on it) was coming unglued.

It was time for her to upgrade. Her birthday is early December, there’s Christmas, and we were married in December. I saw Best Buy had the wifi model with 128GB of storage for $574 (normally 700) and I had an idea – his and hers iPads!  I call it our “Christabirthaversery gift” to each other. My old 2006 era MacBook Pro was great, but it has had a system board issue for a long time.  Cruising eBay, it would cost at least $200 to fix it.  I could find the parts I needed cheaper, but I couldn’t win the auctions. An iPad to replace a Mac?  Considering that the Air 2 has a 64-bit 3-core A8X processor, the first “desktop class” processor ever produced in a tablet and and 8 thread GPU on top of that, it actually has more horsepower than my old Mac.  It comes dangerously close to matching the performance of the low end MacBook Air that starts at $999 with its 128GB of SSD storage.

I chose the gold color.  I felt like I’ve earned it after this year!

The first thing that impressed me was the very compact and minimalistic packaging:

So slim and tiny!

Inside you are presented with the unit, a USB charging cord and power block and very little paperwork.  I was astounded to discover that it really is that thin.

Of course, no unboxing article would be complete without the ceremonial removal of the cellophane!

And, reminiscent of the Mac OS X that I fell in love with so long ago, the bootup screen.

Upgrading is obvious for my wife – a previous iPad user upgrades to a much newer generation of iPad.  But why not upgrade a MacBook Pro with another MacBook Pro?  First of all the obvious is pricing – Apple software is awesome, their hardware is sleek and beautiful, but their pricing is none of the above.  Secondly was in 2006 when I got my original MacBook Pro I wanted something that was as solid as Linux, but much easier to use on a regular basis than Linux.  At that time, “desktop linux” was nowhere near what it is now.  Ubuntu was a brand new operating system, only two years old and not particularly popular (or particularly good for that matter).  Debian was still in the dark ages with primitive desktop support at best.  And hardware drivers? Forget about it.  But today everything I wanted on Mac OS can be had in modern Linux.  Aside from that, Mac OS actually has nothing at all to do with Linux being a BSD mach kernel that was never touched by Linus Torvalds, but that is a whole other article in itself.  I kept noticing as I went on into “Lion” and “Mountain Lion” and all the “national park” named Mac OS releases that they were getting more and more iPad-like.  The iPad has evolved to compete with the Microsoft Surface, which is touted as “the tablet that can replace your laptop.”

Here is the kicker: Microsoft Office for iPad is free!  And you get 5 gigs of storage free, you can save files to it or on your iPad, and you need not subscribe to Office 365 if you don’t go beyond the basic everyday features.

I am astonished by its performance and looking around for a bluetooth keyboard.

My next adventure?  I got a copy of Minecraft for Dummies…..

Whatever religious or culturally significant holiday is designated for you to celebrate in the month of December, I hope you have a happy one.  Stay geeky!