I left this as a comment for another blog, but I think it can stand on it’s own here.

Years ago I was going to school in Flagstaff, AZ and was going back to Champaign, Illinois to visit my future wife over my Christmas break. A friend and I were going to caravan to Phoenix as his girlfriend lived in the area and I needed to get to the airport. It was snowing heavily, more heavily than I’d ever seen when we’d left Flagstaff, so we left about six hours before my flight, driving away around 3 am.

Maybe half an hour later we’re cruising down the highway at about 30 mph, I’m following my friend, me in my Ford Ranger and he in his girlfriend’s Geo Metro. He decides to speed up a bit to 35 mph; this makes me nervous since my truck doesn’t do so well in the snow. Five minutes later the back end of my truck loosens up and spins me around so that I’m now facing the headlights of the semi that was following me. I keep going though and see the tail end of the Metro before spinning a couple more times and then off the side of the highway into a snow bank.

My friend sees all of this and thinks I’m a goner for sure, but as I rest in the snow bank he pulls off and we spend about half an hour digging out and then hit the road again, this time a respectable 30 mph  until we hit the snow line. We make it down to the airport just half an hour before my flight, before 9/11 this was generally frowned upon, but doable. The lines are so long though, that it takes ten minutes before I can talk to anyone, so when I finally reach a person they tell me that I’m too late and they gave my seats away. I’m assured though, that there’s another flight out later to Detroit and then on to Champaign. The flight to Detroit is delayed, but the gate crew tells me that the Champaign flight is delayed too so I should make it still.

I fly out to Detroit and arrive around 10 pm. I visit the gate crew and am told that the flight to Champaign left hours ago and the next one would leave the following afternoon. I’m stunned and have nowhere to go, and barely enough money for a hotel. I happened to work for Budget Rent-a Car washing cars to pay for school, and one of the perks at the time were cheap rentals, so I find the Budget desk just as they were closing up and ask if they have anything I can drop off somewhere around Champaign. They have a car I can take, but they tell me the closest drop off will be in Chicago, two hours and a half hours from Champaign.

I’m ready to throw in the towel and go sleep on the floor of the airport, but I remember that Budget had just bought another small agency the week prior, so I ask if I could drop the car off there instead if there happened to be a location in the area. They really want to help me out, so $20 later I’m in a car headed from Detroit to Champaign. Six hours of highway driving later and some 27 hours into this travel nightmare I’m passed out at my future wife’s apartment.

Normally I’m a big fan of all things Apple, but this time I’m not so sure. Yes, I can see immediate uses from the standpoint of academic medicine. The device looks like a nice ebook reader and might be a very nice compliment to Epocrates, which just about every med student in the US uses at some time or another.  As well, there are some electronic health records that now have iPhone applications that would probably work well on the iPad. The biggest problem though is that like an iPod, the iPad is a passive device. Steve Jobs says you can’t do anything on a netbook. I don’t think that’s true, give me the choice of writing this blog post on an iPad or a netbook and I’ll take the netbook every time. It’s just easier.

Even as an eBook reader there are problems, particularly for students. How do you take notes on section? How do you mark a section so you know to come back to it from your laptop? Can you use these books on your Mac? Your PC? How is this device better than the recently announced HP slate? How is it better than my old HP TC1100? Yes, I would rather read a book on an iPad as opposed to my Palm Pre, but I can’t fathom how the minimum $500 cost can be justified for something that is a little bit of everything that I already have. The befuddling lack of Flash support reduces the value proposition even further. The iPad doesn’t seem like a good deal, financially or otherwise. Maybe version two will have more to offer, but I’m not holding my breath for version two to ever arrive.

What I think is happening is that Apple is looking to create a tool that operates as another point of consumption for their various stores, particularly this new iBookstore that I’m very curious to read more about. Looking at the ecosystem of Apple products, Mac Pro exists only to foster the creation of content that can then be packaged and sold owners of the rest of the product lines. I can’t fathom how the iPad can be successful when all it can really do is buy other apple products. It’s a glorified iPod Touch that can’t fit in your pocket.

I just had a moment of terrible panic and dread. I was thinking about the existence of heaven or any kind of afterlife and I realized there might not be any coffee in the hereafter. There is nothing more terrifying.

Here are some pictures from yesterday, hopefully I’ll go back soon and backfill the last couple years on my picture server.