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Comment by alextgordon | Hacker News Reader

There's always a rev N+1. Holding off buying hardware at the start of a cycle because of what could come next year is a recipe for never buying anything.

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It's interesting to see all the replies, they show the interest on the iPad, but to be fair with the parent he said the first generation.

I'm with him, as I am with the rest of you. I bought a first generation Macbook: battery problems who led to hard drive problem (tic tic tic no more hard drive) and fan noise problems. The worst of all? Dealing with Apple support. Horrible here in Portugal, paying premium for subpar service really gets you angry.

Am I buying an iPad? Yes, but I will at least check for problems with the batch I'll be buying. It's not expectable to see the regular consumer having this behavior but you should.

If that were the only parameter in the argument, that would be true. However, there are two things, in this case, that make the OP's point valid: First, N=1. This is, for all practical purposes, a Gen 1 device. There really will be a significant improvement in Gen 2, annoyances removed, etc. I learned this the hard way with the G1, a phone I could not honestly recommend anyone buy. But I would council anyone to buy a Nexus One now, even though there will be something better later.

Second - By the time Gen 2 comes around, the apps will exist to make this device ever so much more usable and useful than it is today. Again, this is an N=1 problem that does not apply to N+1 where N>1.

So, to some degree, we're actually at N=3 or 4, with the iPhone 3,3G, 3GS and various incarnations of the iPod Touch being where Apple finessed many of their elements like copy/paste. Also, the mature application development environment, and the 150,000+ Applications would not be what you'd typically find on a Generation 1 device.

What's ironic is that for the longest time, the major hit against Apple was that it didn't put much effort into providing backward compatibility with it's platform, unlike, say, Microsoft that would let you run your DOS Application in an operating system built 30 years later.

Now, the tables have turned, and almost all of your original iPhone applications run just fine on your iPad. It actually drives me crazy how friends of mine ignore the newer iPad apps so they can play the old school iPhone games that I transferred from my iPhone.

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