I did something kind of drastic two weeks ago. With all of the “newness” that goes along with Christmas and the beginning of the year, I got caught up in rethinking a few things. One of the things that I thought about was my computer/technology situation. I have had a 13" MacBook Air since August 2012, and it has been a great computer, probably the best computer I have ever owned. But, in thinking through how I work, and the type of work I do the majority of time, I realized that I didn’t really need that computer anymore. Most of what I do on a daily basis is writing, research, and reading; in each of these cases, my MacBook was overkill.

With this realization, and a bit of old-fashioned American consumerism, I decided to get rid of my MacBook Air and my iPad Air, and replace them with an iPad Pro. In selling both of these devices, I was able to raise the funds to buy an iPad Pro without actually spending any new money (which was my hope, of course). Since I am always interested in “downsizing,” I liked the idea of swapping out two devices for one. If I ever ended up in a situation that I needed something more powerful than an iPad Pro, I figured that I have an iMac both at home and in my office, and if I needed something really powerful, I could always use the recording studio at the college—heavy multi-track recording is the only that comes to mind that might require lots of horsepower, and I would rather go into the college’s studio to do that anyway.

I’ve told a few people, extended family members included, that most people don’t need anything more than an iPad. The overwhelming majority of the things we all use computers to do, can be done just as well, sometimes better, on a device like an iPad. So, I decided that it was time for me to “practice what I preach,” so to speak, and do the majority of my computer-ing on an iPad. Now, since I was replacing my laptop, I felt that I should probably go with the highest-end of the iPad family. Thus, the 128GB iPad Pro.

Just about everything I write into the foreseeable future will be done right here, on my iPad. Ditto for all of my research, reading, and other day-to-day stuff. I am already finding things that I like better about working this way.