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First, I must admit. I’m an Apple Geek.

Second, I must admit. I strayed from Apple for several years.

I grew up with the Apple II computers. The Apple II, The Apple II+, The Apple IIgs. They weren’t cool, but that’s what we had at home, and at school. I was such a geek that I started learning Apple Basic just so I could write my own programs for it. They were clunky, they had huge FLOPPY drives that somehow I used to always corrupt. You remember them.

Then one day my Santa Claus dropped off a PC for Christmas. It was a Tandy 2000 (Is Tandy even still around?). I fell in love with PC’s and Windows. What can I say, I was a geek. I’m not quite sure what happened to that last Apple IIgs, but needless to say, I lost interest in it. Throughout high school and the beginning of my career in advertising, I never touched a Mac.

I went back to college at 23, after trying several different majors from Accounting to Marketing to Business at community colleges all over the place, this time for photography – which obviously stuck. There I met my wife, Victoria. She had this clunky white thing called an iPod with this cool little wheel that navigated the menu. I didn’t quite understand iPods, or really the interface, but it was kinda cool. Then, she showed me her iBook. Hmmm… I think that was the end of my Windows phase. Within a month, I bought a 17″ PowerBook, a 23″ Cinema Display and, yep, one of those clunky iPods. (I even proposed to my wife, 3 years later with a first generation Video iPod, the inscription on the back read, “Victoria, Will You Marry Me?” She returned the favor for my birthday several months later with our wedding song inscribed on the back, “When You Say You Love Me.”

Now, other than a few servers running Linux and two systems running Windows for our accounting software, my studio is full of Macs. We have iMacs, Powerbooks, Mac Books, MacBook Pro’s, Mac Pro’s, Mac Mini’s, you name it there’s one here.

On The Day of the iPhone Launch

I was 8th in line the day the iPhone came out and, yep, I’ve upgraded with every new version. I ordered a MacBook Air the day they came out. When a new OS is released, I’m there the first day to pick it up, we may not put it on our production systems, but I at least have it on my laptop. They know me by name at my local Apple Store because I shop there so damn much. Part of my morning ritual is checking out sites like MacRumors to see what the latest gossip is. I’m an Apple Geek!

We all knew, for years, that Apple was going to release a tablet. When they finally did announce it, myself and my staff cuddled around a 30″ Apple Cinema Display to watch the keynote (the second it was posted). We giggled with happiness at just the idea of the IPad and couldn’t wait for the day to actually arrive.

I didn’t pre-order one because I knew I wasn’t going to be around to get it because of the Easter Holiday. I KNEW I was going to get one though. On Saturday, I waited for the afternoon when I felt like the rush would be over. I wasn’t sure that I would get an iPad, I figured they’d be 100% sold out, but one of the best things about being away from the big city on the day of an Apple launch is the smaller stores don’t sell out as fast.

Un-Boxing the iPad

I walked into the Apple Store in the Smith Haven mall (on Long Island) at around 2:00PM, as I played with one of the 30 or so that they had on display, my wife went to find a salesperson to see if they had any in stock. They were, quite literally, just unpacking a new shipment.

I’ll be honest, I really want the 3G version, so I just picked up a 16GB WIFI for now and then when the 3G launches, I’ll be the first in line for that. After doing all the necessary family stuff that the typical Roman Catholic family has to do on Holy Saturday, I rushed home to unpack my brand new iPad. God is it pretty!

THE CHALLENGE
I check my email about 100 times a day. When I’m not shooting, Ninety percent of my day is reviewing pre-production documents, responding to questions from my staff or clients, reviewing production budgets, etc. I spend most of my time in the studio working on the laptop and when I’m running around the city, I have my iPhone.

One thing was quite different this weekend though, instead of running to my laptop, I just pulled out the iPad and did what I needed to do. In fact, I haven’t opened my laptop since Saturday at 11:00PM when I opened my iPad and set it up. I’ve read my morning paper on the iPad, reviewed concepts sent in from a makeup artist for my shoot on Wednesday, responded to hundreds of emails, listened to NPR, watched/listened to the Yankee game in AtBat; Just about everything I’ve needed to do, I could accomplish it on the iPad.

So I’m going to put the iPad to a little challenge. I’m going to attempt to use the iPad for (nearly) every task I need to do on a computer for the next week – Starting NOW! Since the iPad isn’t supposed to be a total computer replacement, I will still use a desktop system to review images, do post production and shoot tethered and do the high processing power tasks with regards to my images. And, of course, when I’m on the run, I will still use my iPhone for checking my email, texting and making calls. Everything else, it will be the iPad.

I’m going to try to post a mini-journal entry here every day.

So, now begins The iPad Challenge.