Ever since I bought my first laptop well over a decade ago, I think that I’ve taken one on every trip with a few exceptions. With the rise of the iPad, no longer do all my trips necessitate me taking a laptop. In the last year, I’ve been on 2 trips with just my iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard (to make it easier for me to blog :-)), and a MiFi for connectivity. The first trip my wife forbid me from taking my laptop and I survived; the second trip which was last month I actually didn’t want to travel with my laptop.
The iPad 2 has pretty much sealed the deal that I don’t have to travel with a laptop on non-work trips. Now that I’m a salaried employee and actually get time off where people are bugging me, I don’t feel compelled to fix bugs, write code, tweak a server, etc. Also the power of the iPad to edit videos makes it an ideal device to take on a vacation where I can take pictures and shoot video, then assemble a movie while still on vacation (the catch here is that our digital camera has to store the video in a format that the iPad can read when I put the SD card in the camera connection kit; I’ll address this in another post).
The “limited” abilities of the iPad are a huge plus to me as there is no way that I can write code on it and I don’t feel guilty about it. There is no doubt in my mind that on my next vacation, my laptop will be left at home.