I recently bought an iPad.

I was basically looking for something small that I can carry forth and back between home and work without too much effort and that lets me do email and other internet things conveniently. More than an iPhone but certainly less than my big ol' Macbook Pro. As I've been told the iPad fits right in the middle. Great.

Since I also do lots of hacking I needed a real keyboard, so I got one. The other thing you need for hacking is a shell (i.e Terminal), got that too. Oh, and I need to be able to install things (like rvm, mongodb, ghci, maybe even xcode). So iOS needs to be loosened up a bit.

Not super necessary, but definitely convenient is having a bit more RAM to keep apps running in the background, so you can do "real" multitasking (if you're like me you cmd+tab all the time between shell, browser, text editor, etc. and wouldn't want to wait for apps to "wake up" after returning from background).

So what I have at this point is a device with

• a ~10 inch screen
• a keyboard
• a shell
• iOS sans all the restricting BS
• and proper multi tasking support

Oh, and then there's the touchscreen, yeah. But honestly, I'm much faster with that keyboard I just got (and maybe a little touchpad). So, whatever...

And TADA! That iPad I bought just turned into a sweet Macbook Air 11", the iPad for Hackers^{TM (not really)}.