Impressions from a few months with the iPad 2

Some weeks ago—this is something of a shameful admission for me—I stood in line for hours at the local Best Buy store in order to purchase an iPad 2 on the device's launch day. I'm not one of, you know, those guys, and I hadn't intended to commit much time to the endeavor. Nevertheless, I got sucked in by Best Buy's promises of a well-organized ticketing solution that would let me reserve a spot without standing in the store for hours on end. Such promises turned out to be a mirage, and I became a conflicted hostage, forgoing lunch and potty breaks in order to reserve my place in line.

I suppose it was, in the end, just as well. I got to participate in the full-on iPad 2 buying experience, a ritual that is largely foreign to me as a PC geek. And it is a strange thing. Folks don't regularly line up in order to purchase much cooler computer hardware. As far as I know, nobody had to initiate a ticketing system for the Radeon HD 6990 or Dell's 30" IPS display. I've used them both, and I can tell you: worth lining up for. Exquisite. But here people were, congregated inside a depressing big-box electronics store in order to drop hundreds of dollars on securing a 10" tablet.