the iPad and us (part 2 - full disclosure)

Okay, here's the thing. Jane and I, lesson planners, web surfers, international corresponders, digital photographers, and all around online junkies that we are, have sometimes been known to (brace yourself here) fight over who gets to use our household's one computer - an Apple MacBook that will turn five years old (I think that's around 167 in dog years) this summer. Add three kids clamoring to watch a video or go onto Starfall.com every now and then, and we soon started thinking that we wanted to get another computer. No, we needed a new computer. Funny how these things escalate, isn't it?

And we wanted an Apple - not so much because we're fiercely partisan in the whole Mac vs. Windows war, but because we've had Macs for the last going on ten years now, and it would be a huge pain to switch over. And there's viruses, spyware, the hassle of buying any kind of computer in China with government-mandated software, the fact that our Macs have been incredibly reliable over their lifetimes, and the additional fact every time I've used a PC lately, I've felt like I'm driving a 1986 Buick Skylark. (So yeah, maybe we do lean to the Mac side here, don't we?)

It was about then that the news of the iPad 2 came out. It's an iPad! And hey, wow, there's a big number 2 after it! And all for less than half the price of a (new Apple) laptop! I had heard about David Hockney's iPad paintings before, so I was already hooked on the idea of getting one. All it took was a session of Fruit Ninja on a friend's iPad in Chengdu, and Jane was in as well.

And if it's good enough for David Hockney, it's good enough for me...

So, a couple of bits of research here, a couple of online ordering sections there, and our American credit card, and I'd ordered an iPad (black, 3g enabled, no-engraving-on-the-back-but-thanks anyway) to be shipped to our organizations headquarters in Virginia so that it would arrive in time for our boss to bring it to us when he was due out in mid May. Which he did, and now we are the proud owners of a new iPad, complete with the painting application, a pretty cool Chinese dictionary, and yes, Fruit Ninja...

(the real productivity tool that we've been looking for)

Now back up a moment - did anyone notice anything strange here? Remember what the Foxconn factory down the road makes? Yep, the iPad2. So there's a pretty good chance that our iPad could have been made in Hongguang, trucked out to the port of Shenzhen, put onto a container ship to Long Beach, sent to a warehouse in Silicon Valley somewhere, flown to an air cargo processing center outside of DC, trucked again to my boss's place in Virginia, driven back to DC inside his luggage, flown back to Beijing and then to Chengdu, and then taken by high speed train back to our house, which is a 15 minute bike ride from where it was initially made. Hmm, why didn't I just bike over to the factory, knock on the door, and ask them to give me my iPad directly? My Chinese is probably good enough, and I would have saved everyone a lot of trouble...

Another strange thing? All of this, and I bought our iPad for about 80% of what it would cost to buy an iPad here in China. How in the world can a piece of electronics travel halfway around the earth and back and still cost me less than, say, what we used to pay for car repairs each year back home? More on that in the next post, though here's a clue...