This is what happened to me as well. I fought off the push to buy a tablet despite a lot of friends showing me theirs (and admitting that they were cool). At

This is what happened to me as well. I fought off the push to buy a tablet despite a lot of friends showing me theirs (and admitting that they were cool). At the same time, I had a desktop for "heavy lifting" like graphic design and 3d animation, storing a big media library, playing games, etc. I also kept a cheap, portable laptop for the occasional times I needed to travel and wanted some semblance of computing from a hotel room or an event. For all of the other lightweight tasks, I had been using smart phones since the early Treo days so that was fine for email and looking up info. But then I was planning a longer trip from the US to Southeast Asia for several weeks and it was going to involve a lot of hopping from town to town. Suddenly even my laptop was too much to carry when I already had everything on my back. I caved and bought an iPad 2 for a good deal more than I wanted to spend. They were still hard to find so I could only find the larger capacity models and the only Android tablet worth considering (Xoom) was not as capable and still cost about the same. That iPad was pretty cool and I used it for a year or two before it just got to be a pain in the ass. Updates were de facto mandatory as you mentioned. Staying on old OS versions meant unsupported apps and constant nagging. But each OS update made the thing perform worse and worse. The hardware cycle was much faster than that of desktop/laptop computers at that point so I couldn't assume the normal 5+ years of usefulness I'd get from a laptop and there's no option to just install a lightweight Linux distro or downgrade. Even after I jailbroke it I couldn't really do much to speed it up. At this point, doing more than opening a single browser tab or lightweight application will make the thing lag and stutter and generall suck. I think now it gets powered on a few times a year for me to check on updates and see if there's anything worth checking out. Haven't bothered selling it since it's my only iOS device and I figure there may be a point where I want to try some iOS exclusive so I keep it around for that.