Above is the chart for Apple stocks over the time period that my lab has been operational. I’d like to think I have played some small part in that, since I’ve converted a few incoming students from the Windows world to Mac, bought a few big ones for the lab myself, and pitched the utility of having an iPhone while in Faculty Senate meetings.

More recently, to celebrate some good news (and to blow a little bit of summer salary), I bought an iPad. Yes, I’m riddled with guilt for buying a new gizmo, no matter how benign they claim the construction materials to be. I was worried that I was just going to find it as another toy, and assumed I could always sell it if it wasn’t truly being useful.

I have to say now, having had it for a month, it is actually a really nice part of my “productivity”. Administrators, please don’t laugh! I’ve been effectively paperless since getting it, reading and marking up a couple dozen PDFs, reading books (and most recently a monograph on the biology and oceanography of the Humboldt Current System), and even reading Science updates on there. I can take decent notes with the Note Taker HD app, and I’m learning how to use tools like 2Screens to give presentations - I think this will be useful for teaching, as I can annotate my cryptic slides on coalescent theory in real-time.

Of course, I could have done that with an overhead projector, but I don’t know if we even have one of those anymore....

Anyway, after getting over my bashfulness about bringing it to lab group and seminar, I find it nicely indispensable. It is more friendly to have in meetings than a laptop that you hide behind, though of course it has its limits. Then again, a laptop isn’t as easily handed to a 4-year-old as an iPad is, with nicely intuitive games and puzzles that are actually decent educational material. I wonder if any of our sequence alignment software will get ported to the iPad soon....?

Tags: computer, gizmo