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About the Author

Andy Ihnatko has been The Chicago Sun-Times' technology columnist for ten years and a columnist for Macworld and other Mac magazines for twenty. He is also a host of MacBreak Weekly, consistently rated among iTunes' top-ten most popular tech podcasts, and he frequently contributes tech segments to local and national news programs.

Although he covers all aspects of technology, Andy is so closely associated with Mac OS and iOS communities that both operating systems have been hardwired to spell and pronounce his last name correctly. "Dad was pleased and proud when I told him about that," Ihnatko says. "But less so when I demonstrated it. It's based on recordings of my own voice and unlike Dad, I'm a lifelong New Englander. Dad and his siblings pronounce it one way; I, and now tens of millions of computers, pronounce it differently."

Chapter 2: Gearing Up

This chapter, my fellow sensation-seekers, is all about finding the courage to spend even more money on iPad-related hardware.

Yes, I said courage. When you’re still ducking the stink-eyes that have been plastered all over your loved ones’ faces ever since you came home with a new iPad instead the family tickets to see “Disney On Ice,” that you promised to spend the household mad money on, you can’t spend even more money on accessories without tapping into the gutsy spirit of The Greatest Generation. Plus, maybe the budget for your three kids’ after school sports fees for the rest of the year.

It’s a smart use of your funds, anyway. The kids wouldn’t have learned anything from The Little Mermaid’s Magical Princess Adventure that they weren’t going to pick up on the streets eventually, anyway. And as good as the iPad is, there are some specific bits of gear that take it to the next level and upgrade it from Cool and Useful to Awesome and Indispensable.

After spending a full year with my iPad as a constant companion, there’s an small but intense inventory of accessories that I can’t do without.

Easel Cases

The iPad only has a few intrinsic drawbacks. At the head of the list: neither God nor Humankind has yet built a pair of pants so large that you can just slide it in a back pocket. You’re going to have to carry it around, and you’ll need to put it in some sort of case for protection.

I’ve yet to find a carrying bag that’s good enough to bless for universal consumption (“good enough” is too highly-subjective a concept). And I continue to be baffled by iPad cases that do nothing more than surround this slick, beautiful sheet of technofab inside a chunky box of padded vinyl. Pass!

Instead, what you need is a slim jacket that adds little extra bulk but which (a) protects the screen from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (and the cast-iron souvenir model of the Washington Monument you forgot you had in your bag when you threw in your iPad), (b) makes the iPad a little “grippier” in your hands, so you won’t drop it when you get to that really shockingly horrifying scene in The Shining, and (c) converts into a stable tabletop easel. You want at least two stable angles: upright for reading, watching video, and conducting video chats, and a slightly elevated angle for comfortable typing.

I’ve only come across two that are worth singling out:

Apple’s Own iPad Smart Cover

Leave it to Apple to obsess over an iPad case. But I suppose their design for the iPad 2’s Smart Cover represents a certain amount of remorse over what they did with last year’s iPad case. The easel stand they released with the first iPad seemed like an afterthought. It was a tacky vinyl envelope and the one thing it did most successfully was make your iPad look so cheap and boring that nobody would want to steal it.

The cover they designed for the iPad 2 (no, it won’t work on the original iPad) is just as much a boast about Apple design as it is a practical iPad case. It gets the job done — including the “protect the screen” mandate — while adding next to nothing to the iPad’s size and taking away exactly nothing from its iPad’s style. It clicks on with powerful magnets (aided by complementary magnets inside the iPad itself) and aligns itself perfectly almost every time.

The hinges allow the cover to fold flat against the back of the iPad. Or, you can roll it up: more magnets inside the cover hold it into a tight triangular bar shape. It nicely props up the iPad vertically for movie viewing or FaceTime, or it’ll leave the iPad flat at a comfortable elevated typing angle.

And the cover is part of the iPad experience, too. Lift the cover and the iPad wakes; you don’t even need to fiddle with the standard onscreen Unlock slider. Close it and it goes back to sleep. Slick.

It’s pricy for what it is: $39 for the polyurethane models (available in an array rainbow colors that say “I’m fresh, I’m free, I’m a quirky iconoclast who’s nothing like my parents”) and $69 for the leather ones (which feel great, will age well, and say “I could afford the extra thirty bucks; how about you, ya damn hippie?”). Other manufacturers will make knockoffs for $20 or $30 but I doubt they’ll be as well-engineered as Apple’s original.

The Scosche FoldIO

The iPad 2 case is slightly magical, yes (it has magnets), but it has some limitations. It only protects the screen; the iPad’s metal back will acquire its share of scratches and scuffs. The cover only fits the iPad 2. And as a stand, it only offers two angles: upright and flat.

The $45 FoldIO from Scosche (www.scosche.com) solves all of those problems. It’s a full folio case that surrounds your iPad in a sturdy, leather-like shell. It’s thicker than Apple’s cover, which augurs well for the “protection” part of the competition, while remaining thin enough to maintain the grace dignity of the object. Your iPad settles into it via corner clips that leave your fingers free to roam the full acreage of glass.

You can still fold the cover around the back for comfortable reading and for added drop-proofey grippiness. Its Big Win is its adjustability. You can tilt your screen into five different angles. You can find the most comfortable viewing angle with the least glare. If you’re using the Apple cover (and most other easel stands) you’re forced to adopt a Calvinist attitude of “I was meant to suffer like this” and simply forge ahead as best you can.

Keyboards

I was surprised to find that I could type perfectly well on the iPad’s virtual keyboard, after spending a little time convincing my fingertips to stop freaking out from the lack of tactile feedback.

Still, when you’re relying on an iPad for real work, and you’re hoping to leave your notebook behind as frequently as possible, you need a mechanical keyboard.

Apple Wireless Keyboard

Here’s another selling point of an easel stand: when your iPad can prop itself up at a comfortable viewing angle all on its own, there’s no need to look any further than Apple’s standard Wireless Keyboard. What are you looking for in a keyboard? You want something affordable that’s small and sturdy enough to travel with. Done, done, and done. It’s just $69, it’s barely bigger than the bank of keys it holds, and it’s made out of metal.

At the top of the feature list is “comfort,” though. This is the same keyboard that Apple ships with its desktop Macs. It’s the same size and has same keyswitch design. Writing on an iPad with this keyboard is no different from writing on an iMac or a MacBook. I can blur straight through writing projects at my maximum typing speed.

The iPad will work with any Bluetooth keyboard, of course. But I’ve never found one that matches the quality and value of Apple’s. And while I’m...amused...by models that fold up into something the size of a deck of cards, they’re much more expensive. Plus, I mean, you already let go of the “I’d like to carry everything in my pockets” dream when you bought the iPad, didn’t you?

The Apple Wireless Keyboard is slick but bloody hell, I wish Apple hadn’t been so damned stylish when they designed its power switch. If you don’t take precautions, when you take your iPad and this keyboard out of your shoulder bag you’ll discover that you’ve got far less battery power left than you thought. Every time the keyboard jostles in the bag, the iPad “hears” a keypress and wakes from sleep.

There’s an easy workaround: just go into your iPad’s General settings panel and switch “Bluetooth” to “Off” before you head out the door. But I still wish that Apple had just put a simple mechanical Off switch on the keyboard.

(“What about Apple’s iPad Keyboard Stand, Andy?” you ask. Yeah. It stinks. Its unwieldy shape defies you to even try taking it from one desk to another, and it forces you to use the iPad in portrait orientation. If you have your iPad in an easel case (and you should) then there’s no reason to own one of these things.)

A Couple Of Rubber Stoppers

Is that trademarked? Oh, bother. No. I should trademark that. Because it’s actually one of my favorite iPad stands.

I certainly prefer it to a purpose-made stand. Apple, and third-parties, make a phalanx of different desktop and bedside stands. I’ve tried a dozen of them and liked none of them. Most iPad users will keep their devices in some sort of case all the time, and few stands are designed to accommodate cases. If it’s in a case, you don’t need a stand, anyway.

Rubber Stoppers are the exception. And when I say “rubber stoppers” I mean, literally, you go to your local home center or hardware store and rummage through the parts aisle for a pair of thick black rubber stoppers. You can buy a pair of 1.5” stoppers for about six bucks and they’re obviously way more portable than a conventional hard stand, at a fraction of the cost.

Some simple rubber stoppers, available at most hardware stores, can help keep your iPad from skittering about on a table.

Slide them under the far corners of your iPad and they’ll keep it elevated at the perfect typing angle. The rubber grabs on to the back of the iPad and the table and prevents anything from sliding around. If you take a razor blade and cut a deep V-shaped groove into the tops, they’ll also grab the bottom edge of the iPad and prevent it from falling flat when you’re at a diner and want to lean it against something solid so you can read while you make your way through a chicken club.

Clamcase

One alternative keyboard merits a special shout-out: the Clamcase ($149 from www.clamcase.com).

It’s a qualified shout-out, to be sure. The Clamcase turns your iPad into a netbook, more or less. It’s a hard, hinged case with a mechanical keyboard at the bottom and a frame at the top which your iPad clicks into.

The Clamcase instantly turns your iPad into a laptop-like, easy-to-transport, computer.

But though the case makes the iPad a lot thicker, it doesn’t increase its footprint. Hooray!

No, no...that’s bad: it means that you’ll have to make do with a miniaturized keyboard that’s no wider than the iPad. So it won’t be very comfortable to type on. I can actually type faster on the iPad’s virtual keyboard than I can on keyboards of this size.

To recap: The Clamcase is more than twice as expensive as the Apple Wireless Keyboard, it makes your iPad bulky and ugly, and it’s not a terribly comfortable thing to type on.

So why am I even mentioning it? Because it’s the sole solution to the problem of using your iPad like a laptop. As in: typing with the iPad actually on your lap. I cover many events in which I have to take furious notes while sitting in a folding chair in an auditorium and while I vastly prefer the Apple Wireless keyboard, I’ve yet to hit upon a jury-rigged solution that’ll let me type even a fraction as easily as I can on even the lamest conventional notebook computer.

Food for thought.

Power

Apple provided you with a marshmallow-sized 10-watt power adapter that can top off your batteries toot sweet. It’s even super-convenient to travel with. But I’ve found two different alternative power products that have proven to be worth their weight in your favorite material with a high Value to Weight Ratio.

Targus Premium Laptop Charger

Apple’s charger does a great job, it’s tiny, and you got it for free with your iPad. So why bother spending about $80 (street price) for this dealie from Targus (www.targus.com)?

Because it’s geared towards the problems of travel. It’s modular. It can power and charge your iPad from any 110V-220V outlet in the world, but you can also swap in an included adapter to charge from your car or airline seat power. The AC power spades rotate a full 90 degrees, which means that you can sneak it into any available outlet...like the one remaining port on a shared power strip that only still available because nobody can squeeze their own power bricks in there.

The business end of the charger splits in two. You can charge any two devices at once from this same adapter. And I do mean “any”: you snap on a power tip for the devices you own. Traveling with an iPad and an iPhone? iPad and a Blackberry? iPad and a camera? Snap on the right two tips and you’ve got the problem solved, minus the bulk of multiple chargers.

New Trent IMP1000 External Battery

An external battery pack falls firmly in the “You’ll never need one...until the one time you wish you had it.”

The iPad packs ten hours of battery life. That’s clearly enough to last you through a whole day without needing a recharge, right? Right. You make a good point. I salute your intellect and savvy...and I’m not just saying that because you’ve bought my book.

(Edited to add: actually, I know for a fact that you haven’t bought it yet, because this sample chapter is intended for free distribution. But I can tell that you’re the sort of kind, thoughtful person who can be counted on when this book becomes available for pre-order.)

But it’s not hard to come up with scenarios in which those 10 hours can be stretched thin. I live in Boston and often fly to the west coast. 90 minutes in a crowded airport waiting area where I can’t find an outlet plus a six-hour flight can easily put me in San Francisco at 1:00 p.m. with an afternoon’s worth of business ahead of me and a battery at 50 percent.

And that’s not a worst-case scenario. I might have forgotten to top off the battery before I went to bed. My flight might get delayed. Once every couple of years, I truly am in a Seriously Ill-Considered mode of transit and I’m away from outlets for 20 hours.

In all of those situations, and just in general principle, it’s a relief to know that I filled up a box of spare electrons before I left the house. I’m old enough to have traveled with laptops that only ran for two hours on battery. If there was any chance that I needed to use it after I landed, I couldn’t watch movies or do anything fun with it on the flight. I will die, or kill, before I am dragged back to those barbaric times.

I won’t.

Shhhhhh.

I. Simply. Won’t.

Which is why I often carry an external battery pack when I travel. It’s a safety net and a free pass to go ahead and spend hours gaming, reading, viewing, and otherwise piddling away my iPad’s stored charge with full Gatsby-like abandon. Many companies make these things: it’s a simple gadget, just a stack of batteries in a semi-attractive case. It’ll power or charge any device that you can plug into its USB port.

The iPad is a special kind of beast that draws a lot more power than a smartphone. You need a charger that’s rated for it. New Trent’s IMP1000 (www.newtrent.com) can pump out 11000 mAh of power is up to the task: it can fully recharge the iPad from zero, or double the running time of your iPad’s battery if you just leave it plugged in.

New Trent’s IM-P100 power pack provides extra juice to your iPad when recharging from a power source isn’t available.

And remember: it’ll revive any device that can charge via USB. I like the New Trent because it’s affordable ($80 street), compact, and easy to use. It means that when a storm cancels all outbound flights, you won’t have to go from passenger to passenger in the terminal, begging for thirty minutes on their outlet like some sort of damned animal.

Video Out

My ideal is to travel with my iPad and my wireless keyboard instead of my notebook whenever I can get away with it. Video-out is therefore a no-brainer purchase for me and for anybody else who sometimes needs to give presentations.

As with the Keyboard category, this is another segment that Apple has all locked up.

Apple VGA Adapter ($29) and Apple Digital AV Adapter ($39)

You just need to pick one. The Digital AV Adapter ($39) has HDMI-out and a separate dock connector, so your iPad can charge and sync while attached to the display. The VGA Adapter ($29) has, well, yes, VGA, and nothing else.

Your decision will come down to whether or not you’re buying this for mobile presentations. If so, get the VGA adapter. It’s easy to find a projection device that has VGA but no HDMI, and hard to encounter one with HDMI but no VGA.

There are a couple of quirks to keep in mind, though. The iPad OS can use these adapters either for straight video-mirroring (everything you see on your iPad screen goes out to the display) or as a second display when you’re using an app that specifically uses the adapter that way. For instance, your iPad can mirror a driving game onto your living room HDTV, while Keynote is designed so that the projector shows your presentation’s current slide while the iPad screen contains your notes and some navigational buttons that the audience won’t see.

Neat. But the “mirroring” part of this thing is only supported by the iPad 2. If you’re using these adapters with an original iPad, you’ll only be able to use the second display with apps that have been specifically written to take advantage of it (like Keynote). In all other apps, the screen might as well not even exist.

The second quirk: video content that you purchased through the iTunes Store might not play correctly through the VGA adapter.

Buckle in for some turbo-stupidity. Part of the sexiness of HDMI — from the motion picture industry’s perspective — is that it can establish a “secure” connection between the playback device and the screen. That’s not possible over VGA...and that’s why the movie that you bought and paid for and supposedly own won’t play through the iPad’s VGA Adapter.

Yes, the motion picture industry thinks you’re going to patch into the VGA signal and record a low-quality version of Big Mama’s House 2 and put it up on the Internet or something.

The motion picture industry is full of silly people.

There are a million easier ways to make a copy of a movie.

None of them are easier than just finding an illegal copy online and downloading it.

Plus, the Big Momma’s House trilogy isn’t even the best “former standup comedian in a cross-dressing fat suit” movie series.

Plus, plus, even The Nutty Professor isn’t worth stealing, is it?

(Not to worry. When the proletariat inevitably raises the red banner of a glorious revolution, we’ll round up all of those movie executives and re-train them to do something more productive, or at least, something harmless.)

Apple also offers iPad adapters for composite and component video. Yes, you’re very welcome; I thought we’d all enjoy a good laugh. It’s so funny because it’s true.

Camera In

Apple’s iPad Connection Kit ($29) is essential gear for anybody with any nonzero interest in taking pictures. You get two postage-stamp little interfaces that can snap into your iPad’s dock port: one is a standard USB port, one is a standard SD card slot.

In theory, any card or camera that you plug into your iPad via one of these connectors will launch the Photos app and allow you to slurp some, or all, of those stored photos and videos into your iPad. From there, any iPad app can go to town on ’em.

I’ll talk about this in more detail in the “Photos” chapter of this book. Here and now, in the chapter where I’m trying to convince you that certain accessories are Well Worth Your Consideration, I gleefully tell you that the iPad is a hugely useful photo accessory when you’re traveling. If you have a small memory card, you can copy your photos to your iPad and then erase the card. If you have a lot of card storage, you can back up the best shots, in case your card gets lost, stolen, or damaged. Do you really want to live the rest of your life knowing that you could have backed up that photo of you with George Lucas before you dropped your camera off the side of a boat?

More than that, the iPad is an awesome device for “triaging” photos at the end of the day. The worst part of being an enthusiastic photographer is that you get back to the hotel with 8 great photos, hidden somewhere among the 300 that you shot. The iPad will let you view all of them at thumbnails and as 8x10 prints.

My usual return-flight pastime at the end of a trip is deleting photos. When I get home and I dock my iPad, my desktop photo app sees the iPad as a photo source and offers to slurp up the 50 photos I didn’t delete.

The Camera Connection Kit is a true “must have” accessory. It opens up a whole new roomful of Cool on the iPad...and given that it delivers the ability to email and post the photos and videos I take, it’s another reason why I can leave my notebook at home when I travel.

But there are two important notes about the Kit. One is a bummer, and one is pretty cool.

The Bummer: the iPad is strict about the power requirements of anything that you plug into its dock connector. Many memory cards exceed the standard power consumption standards of the card standard; the iPad will refuse to connect to it. You can’t even connect a card reader to the USB iPad Camera Adapter; the iPad will tell you it draws too much power. You won’t have problems connecting a camera via the USB adapter; the camera will be powered by its own battery. You probably won’t have any problems with a premium-brand memory card in the card adapter...but you won’t know for sure until you test it out with that specific card.

The good news: the iPad sees this USB-port-looking thing and treats it like it’s a USB port.

Hint: there are many useful devices that have USB interfaces and are not cameras.

Okay! Yes, you understand where I’m going with this. It is exciting, isn’t it?

Let’s not lose our heads. This doesn’t mean that you can plug a USB hard drive into your iPad and read its files. This is an “accidental” feature that’s undocumented and unsupported by Apple. USB keyboards work fine, as do USB speakers and microphones. Nothing else.

But! It still means that if you want to use the iPad and GarageBand as a mobile recording setup, you can plug in a high-quality USB mic (or even a studio-quality one, via an XLR to USB adapter) and it’ll work with any iPad audio app. That’s cool enough, isn’t it?

(Yes.)

The same power restrictions apply, however: the keyboards and audio gear will need to provide their own sources of power. No problem...just plug them into a powered USB hub and then plug the hub into the iPad USB power adapter. iPad apps will be able to see the device just fine.

Styli

The iPad is so successful in part because the basic unit of interface is the human fingertip. We’ve seen plenty of other tablets and touchscreen devices where the pen or the stylus is like the raccoon that got inside the crawlspace late last fall and died, and is only now starting to thaw out and decompose. That is, the device didn’t come with a stylus but there’s a weird stink about the device that nobody can really place. It’s the result of a designer who never really understood what multitouch is all about.

Still: a stylus is a useful thing to have in a drawer or in your travel bag. There are many conversations — usually at restaurants — where the easiest way to explain something is to just grab your iPad and draw it.

iPad styluses are simple tubes with a felt-like or rubber pad of material on the end that can cause the same kind of capacitive input as your finger. The other end is usually hard plastic or decorative metal.

Do not get so involved in your artistic process that you instinctively flip the stylus around and scrape the other end all over the glass to erase something.

If I ever did this, I certainly wouldn’t admit it. So let’s just move on to a couple of recommendations…

Ten One Pogo Sketch

I want an iPad stylus that works. With that out of the way: I want one that’s cheap enough that I won’t be too broken up if I lose it.

Enter the Pogo Sketch from Ten One Design (www.tenonedesign.com). It lists for $15 but you can get it for half that. The only styli that come cheaper are no-name jobbies and you’ve no idea how well they’re designed until it’s delivered. With a name-brand stylus, I know that the tip is thick and soft enough that the edge of the pen’s metal tube will never dig into the screen.

Hard Candy CandyStylus+

Whereas if you’re a functioning, responsible grownup who’s allowed to have nice things, Hard Candy’s $35 CandyStylus+ (www.hardcandycases.com) is a Darth Maul-style double-sided pen with a ballpoint at one end and a rubber stylus at the other.

Popular Accessories That Have Disappointed Me

There are a bunch of iPad accessories that keep coming through my office and which continue to fail to make any kind of impression on me. I have a supreme tactical advantage: it arrives, I use it for a few days, and then I send it back. At least I’m not out $30 for something that doesn’t work as well as I’d hoped...or which turns out to be kind of pointless to begin with.

Screen Protectors

What rustproof undercoating is to car sales, so iPad screen protectors are to iPad sales. Lots of companies can sell you sheets that splap onto your screen and supposedly protect it from dings and scratches.

Great. But what your iPad really needs to be protected from are screen protectors. I’ve yet to encounter one that doesn’t take this crisp, punchy, beautiful display and make it look like a bus window. That’s in a best-case scenario in which you actually managed to get it on nice and square without any trapped hair, dirt, or air bubbles.

And there’s just no point to them. I’ve carried my iPad everywhere across this and three other countries in the past year. I’ve never put a screen protector on it and there isn’t a single mark on it.

Whoops, one moment please…

(50 seconds of wiping)

...And there isn’t a single mark on it.

If you’re going to be using your iPad in a particularly dusty or grimy environment, a screen protector won’t do you much good anyway. In those “I’m putting my iPad in slight jeopardy but I must have it with me” situations, just slide it into a (good quality) Ziploc bag and seal it up. You can still operate the screen through the plastic and it’ll be safe from dust storms and wet or grungy hands.

As for anti-glare film: I haven’t found one that offers a superior alternative to just adjusting my chair a little.

Car Mounts

Oh, man...how cool would it be to have an iPad mounted on the dash of your car?!?

Wicked totally awesome double-plus cool.

How functional would it be?

Umm…

But it’s so wicked super ultra-cool!!!!

When the iPad was unveiled, the idea of having this awesome color multitouch tablet serving as the navigation and entertainment computer for my car (130,000 miles on the odometer, bluebook value: depends on how many deposit cans I have in the backseat) did verily fill my heart with white-hot lust.

So don’t think I didn’t go into this with the highest hopes. Still I say: car-mounting an iPad just isn’t terribly practical. The iPad’s size is a serious problem. Few cars have enough space on the dash to mount an iPad without covering up essential controls. Most of the best mounting spots on my car, for instance, either cover up all of the heating and AC controls or are somewhere within firing range of the passenger airbag. I’m hoping that History will be kind when they write my obituary, but I don’t think History could resist starting it off with the line “In a testament to Apple’s superior design and engineering, Mr. Ihnatko’s new iPad 2 suffered little damage after passing straight through his neck at near-bullet speeds. ‘No other maker’s tablet would have decapitated him so cleanly,’ said an Apple spokesperson.”

Even if you solve all of those problems, you’ll need to cover the screen with anti-glare film to ensure that it’s even readable in daylight. When the highway bends just a littllllllle bit to the North, presto: you can’t see a damned thing. An anti-glare film won’t work in every situation, either.

So the problem isn’t a lack of good iPad car kits. It’s that the reality of a car-mounted iPad probably won’t live up to your expectations.

If you want to give it a go anyway, Ram Mounting Systems (www.ram-mount.com) makes the best car mounting hardware in the business...and yes, they have iPad-compatible cradles. I use their gear for just about all of my car gadgets. It’s rock-solid and completely modular...so no matter what kind of mounting solution works best for your car and your expectations (suction-cupped onto the window, hard-mounted onto the dash, attached to a pole bolted to the passenger seat rail) you can put together the right components. And when you upgrade to the iPad 3, you’ll only need to replace one piece of it instead of the entire system.

Desktop Docks

No, I don’t even like Apple’s own trim, stylish-as-heck one. I might have some sort of iPad dock disability. Nothing seems to be as convenient as an easel stand for simply keeping an iPad handy. Docks have a built-in dock connector and can charge up the device while it pumps out audio. Sure. But no matter how lazy I get, I can always manage to summon the strength and the courage to manually plug in a dock cable.

Bedside dock/speaker combos have a certain functional purpose. But there’s a reason why I use a $20 alarm clock: I can afford to replace it if the part of my brain that wants to stay asleep chooses to crush it with a lamp.

This is also why I tend to buy $15 lamps.

Most of the items in this chapter — with those last few obvious exceptions — should be somewhere on your mind as you take your first steps along that really tight, curly bit of the yellow brick road. All of them are intensely useful and some — like my FoldIO case, my Wireless Keyboard, and the Camera Connection Kit are firmly in the “my iPad wouldn’t be the same without them” category.

Taken as a group, they actually offer a little insight into Apple’s whole attitude regarding the iPad. Almost all of these accessories can be found among the standard features of the 18 or so devices I’ve seen in the past year that are supposed to compete with the iPad.

So why didn’t Apple give us video-out, or a card reader, or an anti-glare? Because each one comes with a sacrifice. Would you like a USB port? It’ll cost you: the OS will need to load in a million drivers for a million devices, and that’ll affect the machine’s reliability. How about a built-in kickstand, or a card reader? They’ll make the iPad thicker and clunkier. An anti-glare screen coating? Really? Why wouldn’t you want your screen to look as good as it possibly can?

These are all things that have disappointed me about other tablets. Apple, more than any other hardware manufacturer, maintains a firm idea of what their product is. This informs every decision that they make. I’m not far off by guessing that Apple defines the iPad as “A $499 tablet with an absolutely unsurpassable basic user experience.” Making the iPad thinner, lighter, simpler isn’t just a design choice: it’s a functional feature.

This makes me feel very, very good about my iPad.

(Chiefly because I’ve never really added up how much dough I’ve spent on the accessories that make my iPad indispensable.)