As published on the Dunwoody Patch website.
By Adam Freedman
I need to be angry and apparently hypoglycemic to blog. My Mom has had an iPhone for years. She also has an iPad. To keep up with his wife, my dad got an iPad and an iPhone this weekend. This was all I needed. The Mayans were right. Can I borrow some money and I'll pay you back in full on December 22nd? This is not a good thing. Dad is not a technical person. His last cell phone, for the 12 minutes a week that it was used, might have been a Sony Ericcson or a Nokia. He can only surf the web if he has visited the web site previously and can choose it from a dropdown list. He has trouble understanding the light in the fridge, the backup camera on his car, certain traffic lights, how to use a thermostat, etc. But the idea of ease of use technology is definitely going his way. Tablets and touch screen smart phones have become so ubiquitious that even people who fear technology more than proctological exams after eating ghost pepper chilis are buying them in droves. He has no idea what he is going to do with the incredibly powerful technology but since everyone has one, he thought at 71 that he might finally fit in. I almost sat him down for the "friends and jumping off bridges" speech but I felt he would listen to it just as I listened to it and ignored it as a cocky teenager.
This Father's day, my ten year boys bought me, via proxy my wife, via our shared credit card, a newest-model iPad. I am typing this blog on it now. I traded incredibly amazingly competant and super whiz bang sexy yet inexpensive computer repair for a client's iPad keyboard in cool brown leather (last year's Brookstone model in case you want to be like me) and I am actually typing this out on a regular keyboard. I am sitting at Mad Italian (attention Unicorporated-Dekalb-Patch readers! best cheese steak and meatball sub in the ATL), connected to free wifi, and typing this out.
Over the weekend, thanks to my facebook business page at www.facebook.com/dunpc, I sold my backup windows laptop and a superfluous windows netbook. I didn't need them any more. The market had shifted. However, I still use a Windows laptop as my primary business computer just because Quickbooks for Mac is so gawd-awful. My next expense will be a Brother J825DW ($149, your mileage may vary) that is a wireless duplex (no, you won't ever use it for that) airprint compatible printer. That means our 3 iInsertAppleProductNameHere devices can print directly from the device. That is cool.
The market is everchanging. Talk to me in 6 months. 802.11ac will be replacing 802.11n as the standard wireless connection method. Microsoft announced their tablet yesterday called "Surface" and today Google announced their tablet at a very low price point of $199. I hope Dad by waiting 4 years for a tablet didn't jump too soon.
