Ten days after walking into my local RadioShack and buying a brand new iPad, I'm still in love with it.
I have almost no complaints. I use it every day, even more than my MacBook Air.
Yes, my iPad gets kind of warm after using it for a few minutes, but it's not as bad as Consumer Reports and others are making it out to be.
But over the last few days, there's a new, very real problem with my iPad.
Now that developers are finally catching up and updating their apps to match the new iPad's Retina display, I'm running out of space.
That's because many apps are a lot larger now that they support Retina-quality graphics. The worst offender so far is Wired Magazine. Conde Nast updated the Wired app over the weekend with support for the new iPad's display. (It looked really ugly before.)
Before the update, the current April issue weighed in at about 330 MB. Now it's about 530 MB. Keep in mind that this is a smaller issue of Wired. I've seen past issues as large as 600 MB, and that was before the Retina Display was even in existence. I can only imagine how much space a longer Wired issue will take up now. 1 GB?
When I bought my iPad, I went with the cheapest one possible, the 16 GB Wi-Fi model. Now I'm worried those 16 precious gigabytes won't be enough for all that high-resolution content I'll be downloading to my iPad.
Still, I don't think paying Apple an extra $100 for the 32 GB iPad is worth it. Maybe I'm just being a cheapskate, but I've always thought $100 was a lot to ask for a measly 16 extra gigabytes. I understand the flash storage is still pretty expensive, but it's definitely not that expensive.
So I'm sticking with my 16 GB iPad. That means I'll have to constantly manage my content so I can conserve as much storage as possible. Now, whenever I'm done watching a gorgeous HD episode of Mad Men, I'll have to remove it from my iPad to make room for other stuff. If I want to watch it again, I'll have to wait several minutes for the ~1.5 GB file to download. (I wish Apple would fix this by allowing you to stream shows you own via iCloud like you can on the Apple TV.)
Same goes for magazines and rich games like Infinity Blade II. As soon as I'm finished reading or playing or watching, the content has to go to make room for new stuff.
For someone like me who likes to keep stuff forever, that's really annoying.
