How the iPad 2 became Harry McCracken's favourite computer

Harry McCracken in his piece on Technologizer:

At first, when I traveled out of town, I’d bring the iPad and the MacBook Air but use the iPad most of the time. Now I’ve started bringing only the iPad, unless I have specific reason to think I’ll need a full-blown computer. When I went to Chicago on a business trip last month equipped only with the tablet, it was the first time in two decades that I’d boarded an airplane for work purposes without a laptop on hand.

Harry is a writer, so uses the iPad primarily for that purpose. Using the iPad for coding is perhaps a little more difficult, but not impossible. I use Panic's excellent Prompt app for connecting to my server over SSH, so it's relatively painless to fire up Vim to bash out some code when I'm in a bind. But the lack of screen real estate makes it difficult to be really productive.

As for my wife though, who is what I'd consider a more general computer user, this setup would be perfect.