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| Welcome to the future!
Why a laptop, and an iPad? My recommendation to my clients with college bound kids, is to get a desktop Mac, and an iPad. An iPad will do everything they would use a laptop for. Easier to carry, and tougher to break. The long battery life is an added bonus. (not to mention instant on) Laptops are notorious for breakage and needing more maintenance. I usually recommend a Mac Mini for the desktop, and even with having to buy a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, it's cheaper to buy the Mac Mini and iPad than to buy just a good MacBook Pro laptop. I usually demonstrate how they can use the logmein app ($30, and worth it) to access and control their desktop via the internet, and to transfer documents back and forth just in case they forgot to move a document to the iPad. In the first year that I have been recommending this, The reactions have been overwhelmingly on the positive side, and this was before the iPad 2 became available.
You can use the iphone version of Skype on the the iPad 2, but the general consensus is that Facetime works better on the iPad 2. I'll bet that you will be thrilled with the quality of a Facetime video chat. I'm sure that Skype will be coming out with an iPad app sometime soon for those people who just can't let go of Skype.
32 Gigabytes should be fine. That is a lot of documents, apps, books, and music. You can fill that up fast with movies, but you generally don't carry your entire video library on it all at once. I usually show the Netflix app on the iPad, and most people find that works well for watching movies. Only having 32 Gig is a good way to learn how to prioritize what you really have to carry with you. 64 Gig is nice, but only really needed if you are a power user. Good luck, and I know that you will all have fun with the iPads. | |
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IPad 2 -- Facetime or Skype advice?
