I Bought an iPad for My Birthday!

[canyonwalker]

My birthday is this week. I mentioned that a few days ago already. One thing I only hinted at there is that I rarely do anything special on my birthday anymore. I got out of the habit of birthday celebrations from my years in college and graduate school when my mid-December birthday fell not only in the run-up to Christmas but also during final exams week. On my birthday classmates were generally either studying for their last exam and didn't want to carve out time to celebrate with me, or had already finished their last exam and left town for winter break.

Well, just because I've gotten accustomed to not feeling love from others (other than my spouse of many years) doesn't mean I can't practice a little self-love. Monday night I bought myself an iPad!



I got the idea to treat myself to an iPad when we dropped by a Costco store on Sunday. Right next to the sale-priced 15" MacBook Air I envied were a few also-sale-priced iPad models. In particular I thought about the $250 iPad 9th generation model.

As we went out to dinner Monday evening I decided I'd drop by local Costco afterward and pick one up. I've never owned an iPad nor felt like it was a good value for me, but for $250 I decided it was worth a small splurge. Except once we were in the store I up-sold myself to the slightly pricier 10th generation iPad, for $350.



What's the difference between the 9th and 10th generation iPads? For one, the 10th gen is available in this beautiful blue color. 😅 The 9th gen only comes in silver or dark gray. Other than that, it has a one year newer processor (A14 chip vs. A13) and has a slightly larger screen (10.9" vs. 10.2') without being bigger overall. Oh, and it uses a USB-C plug instead of a proprietary Apple Lightning plug.

Like I said, this is my first iPad. I'll figure out over the coming days how to fit it into my routines.

Comments

[sorcyress]

ngl, I don't know if I'd pay $100 just for blue (or for me, a good green) but I'd definitely pay more than zero for it. And I very well *might* pay $100 just to have all my devices use the same charge cables (USBC).

Treat yo'self, as the saying goes!

~Sor

[canyonwalker]

I didn’t spend the extra hundred for the color. I mean, I might have spent 20 just for the color. But mostly I spent up for the newer processor figuring it adds another year to the device’s useful life and makes it snappier to use right away.

[some_other_dave]

I bought an inexpensive Android tablet a number of years back, and added it to my cellular account. It turned out not to be very good at playing Ingress, but I purchased a number of other games for it that I really enjoyed. Unfortunately, I lost it somewhere in the house a couple of years back...

The games I purchased were implementations of board-games that we know. Settlers, Splendor, Galaxy Trucker, San Juan, and maybe one other that's slipping my mind. The Splendor and Galaxy Trucker implementations were excellent! The Settlers was clunky, but still pretty fun. I never got much into the San Juan, but it seemed to be a reasonable implementation. I picked it up because it was bundled with the others.

[canyonwalker]

Wow. I just posted a journal entry outlining the use cases I have-- or don't have-- for an iPad. (See https://canyonwalker.dreamwidth.org/553381.html) I didn't include games on the list. I agree with your point, that a phone is too small for many games, especially tabletop style games, but a tablet really opens up the possibilities.