Like every tech lover out there, the big question is “do I get an iPad?” Maybe you’ll let John August test it for you, maybe you’ll wait until Stu Maschwitz develops this Magic Bullet interface.
Me, I’m not sure. I’d love to have a smaller, lighter version of my laptop, something less crucial to my work which is easier to transport; my life is on my laptop. I’d also love to be able to haul my media with me, have something where I could upload photos, take my writing with me (so I’d need some version of Final Draft and MarsEdit) and surf the web without worrying about leaving personal information on a public computer.
All that said, the iPad is almost there. I wish the OS were more robust and it cost about $200-300 less. So, what other options do I have? Why not a Hackintosh?
I could buy a cheap Dell and hack some OS X onto that sucker. It’s not a bad option but then I can’t upgrade and I’m always circling catastrophic disaster without a life vest because neither Apple nor Dell would be willing to offer me any kind of customer support.
So, what do you think? Should I look into an iPad or a Hackintosh?
Tags: Hackintosh, iPad, John August, Stu Maschwitz
That’s a great question. I, like most people, was very anxious to see what the Apple “tablet” was going to end up being. I was also sad that it ran the iPhone OS and not something like you said, more robust like OS X. Still, the iPhone OS is essentially the touch device embodiment of OS X. I guess if Apple already had such a wonderful OS built for their touch devices, they had no reason not to use it on the iPad.
That said, I’m on the fence. I have owned a hackintosh netbook before, but sold it simply because I didn’t need it. However I’m having regrets now. I really liked having the full Mac OS X on a tiny computer. It ran fast, but the only thing it didn’t do great was play video. However I’ve seen videos on youtube of people hackintoshing a Dell Mini 10v, and all those seem to play video really nicely, as well has multi-task and handle bulky programs very fluidly.
If you have an iPod touch or iPhone I would recommend not getting the iPad, because I think it might give you a feeling of having two devices that essentially can do the same thing, but one just has larger real-estate., The only real benefit to the iPad is the way that the programs are designed to take full advantage of it’s screen size. Viewing web pages and reading documents will be a lot easier, since everything its the full size of the screen, and scrolling is more easy. I can tell you from experience, scrolling on netbooks is something you will not enjoy. You won’t be able to see a lot of the web page, grabbing on to the slider with your small trackpad is not easy. You get really accustomed to using the up and down arrow keys. I don’t know if they’ve enabled two finger scrolling on these devices under OS X, but that would be a huge advantage
All in all, I still say Hackintosh. You can get a lot of support online from mydellmini and so on. You’re really not putting your computer at any hardware risk by having OS X on it. With the iPad, you’re getting a premium product form apple, but the device definitely has it’s limitations. Don’t expect apple to add flash ever, or ever allow multi-tasking on future OS update. I just don’t see it.