iPad without computer?

whiterebel

My Dad has a Netbook, but the keyboard is too small for him. He was looking at buying a 15" Toshiba, which I think is way too much for him. He only does a bit of email, surfing etc, so I think the iPad is perfect. He has WiFi at home, and when he comes to my house, so he is sorted for that. My question is, after I register it for him on my computer, can he get by without a computer? Obviously he can update on my Mac anytime he is around, but other than that is it ok to use without a PC?

Thanks in advance for your replies.

Fat_Fingers

Depends on what he wants to do with it and how often... Web and apps from Itunes don't need access to computer. Loading personal music and videos onto it will require access to computer.

cc

he could keep the netbook and use it for for syncing the ipad occasionly. There will come the time when the ipad will need to be restored or something urgently and it would be handy to be able to do it straight away!

whiterebel

cc wrote: »

he could keep the netbook and use it for for syncing the ipad occasionly. There will come the time when the ipad will need to be restored or something urgently and it would be handy to be able to do it straight away!

Forgot to say the Netbook runs Linux..:o

Graham

Sounds like a good match to me, with one caveat. Can your Dad occasionally backup his iPad to one of your PC's? Maybe create a separate account for him under Windows on your PC for backing-up/updating iTunes would work?

I've no idea why Apple missed allowing this through mobile.me/their cloud. Hopefully they will address this soon.

whiterebel

Graham wrote: »

Sounds like a good match to me, with one caveat. Can your Dad occasionally backup his iPad to one of your PC's? Maybe create a separate account for him under Windows on your PC for backing-up/updating iTunes would work?

I've no idea why Apple missed allowing this through mobile.me/their cloud. Hopefully they will address this soon.

Yes, I have three Macs, so I put an account on one of them for him.

Creamy Goodness

Graham wrote: »

Sounds like a good match to me, with one caveat. Can your Dad occasionally backup his iPad to one of your PC's? Maybe create a separate account for him under Windows on your PC for backing-up/updating iTunes would work?

I've no idea why Apple missed allowing this through mobile.me/their cloud. Hopefully they will address this soon.

the bandwidth overheads would be ginormous how many ipads are out there last I heard was 1million * 16gigs the mimimum ipad size. That's a whole lot of cloud storage also not to mention the size of the pipe they'd need to take it all in and finally well this only applies to Ireland could you imagine me trying to back up my ipad to a cloud service on a crappy 1meg eircom piece of string :pac:

Graham

Creamy Goodness wrote: »

the bandwidth overheads would be ginormous how many ipads are out there last I heard was 1million * 16gigs the mimimum ipad size. That's a whole lot of cloud storage also not to mention the size of the pipe they'd need to take it all in and finally well this only applies to Ireland could you imagine me trying to back up my ipad to a cloud service on a crappy 1meg eircom piece of string :pac:

True to a degree but there are ways they could limit the bandwidth/storage requirements.

Deduplication, no need to backup all your music, once they knew what music you owned. Why store hundreds of thousands of copies of the same song.

Differential, after the initial synch you're only talking about backing up changes.

Of course, for all of this you would need a massive data centre......

Maybe we're not quite ready for this kind of setup but we're definitely getting closer.

Creamy Goodness

well we just don't know actually, i remember reading apple did buy a huge data centre (possibly constructed it) last year.

but there's also rumours going around that MobileMe might become free, so again that would severely ramp up disk space.

Graham

Like this:

New data centre

cnocbui

Bah!

I think that data centre is for taking on Google in the search business as payback for them taking on the iPhone.