14 DAY TRIAL // In an interview with the people at Macworld, American writer Susan Orlean explains how and why she has come to embrace Apple’s iPad. Touting it as a great work and entertainment tool for the road, Orlean lauds the iPad’s long battery life, and its big screen. The Apple tablet, which replaced her ASUS netbook, is like a window to the “huge gigantic world that is the Internet,” she said.
“I work at home with a desktop. I have an iMac… and a MacBook. And I travel a lot so I used to bring the MacBook with me. But two years ago, I was about to go on a trip and I thought, Boy, I really don’t want to carry this MacBook. First of all, it’s heavy; secondly, I really don’t want to lose it, or have it be stolen, or dropped or whatever. …”, Susan Orlean tells Macworld.
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“So I bought a little netbook, an ASUS netbook… Laptops are portable within your house, but they’re not so great for carrying around. And they don’t have great battery life, which is a significant thing if you’re sitting on a plane or a train where you don’t have electricity available easily. So the netbook seemed like a brilliant solution. It was small, it was really light, it went for such a long time without a battery.”
But then Susan realized the netbook wasn’t the way to go either. Just like Steve Jobs said when Apple introduced the iPad, netbooks really aren’t better at anything, compared to other computers, the writer contends.
“Well the problem is it was awful. Teeny, tiny keyboard. Tiny, tiny memory. I just had problems with it. I took it with me to Morocco and I loved the fact that the built in camera worked really well, and I used it for Skype very comfortably. But as for any other purposes, it just didn’t work that well. It didn’t seem to go online very easily, I couldn’t download anything. I tried to put my music on it and I couldn’t. It just wouldn’t fit.…”, Susan told interviewers.
The only thing that did work well with the ASUS netbook was Skype, Susan said. The built-in camera was the only strong point noted by the writer. But then, Susan bought herself an iPad.
“It was great. I got the 3G model. Driving down to the city [for the flight], which is two hours for me, I was able to use it the whole time. I wasn’t driving. I was being driven, I should say…”
“I was already feeling sort of very braggy, thinking, ‘Oh, this is awesome’. Two hours of wasted time that I can now use, which was great. I didn’t have to take it out of my luggage, which I loved,” said Orlean. “Not that it’s a big deal, but flying is such a pain in the neck now that anything that you can eliminate as far as the headache of going through security is wonderful. The fact that I didn’t have to give the battery one moment of thought on the plane was great. And that it was light and it just was great.”
The writer was extremely pleased to have her whole iTunes library on the device, and even more pleased to use it to browse the web in her Wi-Fi-less hotel room on a trip to WITS in Minneapolis. She explained to the interviewers how she also used the iPad to get some work done.
“… I keep my manuscript in Dropbox. I was able to open the Dropbox file and work on it in [Apple’s] Pages.” Orlean admits that “getting it back to your computer seems like it ought to work a little more easily than it does.”
Dropbox, as many Softpedia readers should know, is a cloud-based service which allows everyone owning a computer or a supported cell phone to keep various kinds of files at hand, backed up, and constantly updated with the latest changes.
Orlean said she could accept other people’s point of view, in that the iPad doesn’t make much sense with laptops and smartphones around. Yet her view of the tablet device is a tad different:
“I think it’s like carrying around like a little window with you, and you can peak through that window into this huge gigantic world that is the Internet.”
“And while you can do that with your phone, it is so much more visual, and almost tactile and alive doing through the window, the iPad. And that’s how I feel. I just feel like it’s a window. Literally, it even looks like a window,” she said.
The full interview is available here.