Last week I wrote about my decision to go with the 16GB Wi-Fi iPad. If you haven’t read that piece yet, I suggest doing that first and then coming back to this later.
On March 16, I had waited patiently in line for a new iPad. Long story short, I did end up with the 16GB Wi-Fi, however, after spending the weekend installing apps, I quickly discovered that I was filling up the device. With 58 apps installed, I had about 4GB of storage space left. I should actually preface this and state that I had zero video, photos, or music on the iPad at this point.
On Sunday, I quickly started to realize that I would probably need the 32GB model. I decided to return my iPad to the Apple store this week and exchange it. I made a last minute decision while waiting in line to swap it for a 32GB LTE model. I can’t tell you how much I’m loving the LTE speeds. It truly is useful to be able to have Internet access anywhere I am. Although 90% of the time I’ll be on Wi-Fi, that 10% when I’m not gets annoying when I actually need Internet access.
Speaking of LTE speeds, I’ve been testing my carriers network here in Vancouver — which happens to be Rogers — and I’ve been getting blistering LTE speeds. The fastest I’ve tested so far is 38Mbps downstream and 29Mbps upstream.
These speeds are faster than what most people tend to get for their home broadband! At home, I have a 100Mbps downstream and 5Mbps upstream connection. On my iPad with LTE, my upstream speed is five times the speed of what I get at home. Truly these are breathtaking results, although it remains to be seen whether or not these speeds will be sustainable as the network becomes congested with more LTE enabled devices in the future.
There are very valid reasons — which I can only guess — why Apple didn’t just introduce the new iPad in 32/64/128GB flavours. The most obvious thing that comes to mind is pricing. They probably haven’t been able to get the cost of solid state storage down to where they want it to be. Sure, they could have given us 32/64/128GB options today, but not without increasing the cost of the iPad. Apple certainly is not going to compromise pricing for storage space — period.