Why Shouldn't I Hate My iPad?

Advice for would-be iPad owners: try it before you buy it. John Swansburg didn’t, and “now I just feel annoyed, having spent $600 on a device that hasn’t done anything to improve my life,” he writes in Slate. “A salad spinner would have been a better investment, and I don’t even eat that much salad.” So he asked his colleagues what there was to like about the device. A taste of their replies:

• Jessica Grose: “Maybe the problem is that you are expecting it to be more than a toy.”
• Farhad Manjoo: “Sixty percent of my iPad time is spent on Netflix.”
• Ellen Tarlin: “Get married. Then you can use it to ignore your wife.”
• Timothy Noah: “It is a superb vehicle for reading books (especially fat ones which are a pain to lug around). … It also provides the great gift of illumination, which is very important for those of us past 45.”
• John Dickerson: “I have downloaded lots of games but only chess works for me. All the others seem one-dimensional though very pretty, which in some ways describes the iPad.”

None of this changed Swansburg's mind. For the full email chain, click here. (More iPad stories.)