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Is iPad worthless without Internet

rahul247rocks

rahul247rocks

macrumors member
Original poster
May 18, 2012
79
0
Hey Guys,
I wanted to ask this question to all of you. Do you think the iPad is worthless without internet. Agree or Disagree. You can even share some apps that does useful jobs when you are offline. Just wanting to know the point of view of all the iPad users.
 
My iPad is really a consumption device for me so it will be used a lot less without internet. I can play some games, read, etc without the net of course.
 
I know that if I'll be in a place without Internet the day before I start downloading things to do like having a book, a game, things to read offline.
 
rahul247rocks said:
Hey Guys,
I wanted to ask this question to all of you. Do you think the iPad is worthless without internet. Agree or Disagree. You can even share some apps that does useful jobs when you are offline. Just wanting to know the point of view of all the iPad users.
Click to expand...

Do you mean entirely without the Internet or just wifi-only? At some point you will need to connect to some kind of internet resource just to get the offline apps that you want recommendations for.

I have a 3G iPad2 that is rarely off my home wifi network and it does almost everything I have ever needed a laptop to do and many things I could never have done on a laptop.

So, the real question is this: what environment are you planning on using an iPad in and will you have no access to the Internet ever?
 
hello there, i will share my experience with both an iPad 2 wifi-only and an iPad 3 LTE

i owned an iPad 2 wifi for about 6 months - bought a refurb back in May. i have an iPhone 4S that's jailbroken so i have free unlimited 3G wifi tethering. whenever i needed internet on my iPad, i just switched on the wifi tethering on the 4S settings and boom, i was online on the iPad. problem is, whenever i had to use my iPhone to make a call the connection would drop out. sometimes it would automatically reconnect, other times i would have to manually turn the tethering off, then on again. after about 6 months, it started to get on my nerves. free is free, but it started to make me less productive combined with the fact that wifi tethering destroys the 4S battery.

i gave my iPad 2 wifi to my brother and i bought an iPad 3 LTE model last week. i am doing the 1GB for $20 prepaid plan. once i reach 1GB i will just switch back to wifi tethering to my iphone until the next billing cycle comes. for $20/mo to be able to have my iPad have its own independent internet connection is definitely worth it to me, plus the fact that all content on the iPad 3 LTE is always up to date to the second. for $20/mo - it's worth it to me. now i did pay an extra $130 to get the LTE model, but keep in mind, you will get a chunk of this back in resale when you sell it


my suggestion is this - if you have the extra $130 to spend on the LTE model...DO IT. you can always decide later if you don't want to subscribe to a LTE prepaid data plan. but having the option there is key. what if you know you won't be near an outlet all day but you need an internet connection. on your iPad you can activate the verizon (or AT&T) plan instantly, boom, now you have 1GB for $20 or 2GB for $30. once you are done with it, you can either ride out the rest of the month or call up verizon to cancel. they will give you a pro-rate refund back for the unused portion of the data
 
rahul247rocks said:
Hey Guys,
I wanted to ask this question to all of you. Do you think the iPad is worthless without internet. Agree or Disagree. You can even share some apps that does useful jobs when you are offline. Just wanting to know the point of view of all the iPad users.
Click to expand...

Your question is rather pointless. Without internet, there would be no MacRumors site, so you wouldn't be posting the question, and nobody would be posting any replies. Does that answer your question?

That said, without internet you could still rip music and DVDs on your Mac and transfer them to your iPad, so you could take music and videos with you wherever you go. You could still take photos and make videos, transfer them wirelessly back to your Mac to burn them on DVDs, and print them out. You could listen to audiobooks and read eBooks; without the Internet, your local bookstore would probably sell eBooks on CDs. (Note that WiFi works just fine without Internet). Buying apps and games for your iPad would require you to go to a physical store, but that could all be done. And iOS 6 would ship on a DVD that you put into your Mac, and then download from there.
 
I think the iPad needs the internet to be useful. I can go a couple days without it while traveling by downloading a book and caching some NYT articles ahead of time, but all of the things the iPad is good at require internet. That would be email, streaming videos, updating the news and weather, syncing calendars and documents, etc.
 
Worthless is too strong a word, but it would be severely hampered without Internet for most people. But you also must consider that the same thing is pretty much true for a PC, a laptop, or a cellphone, to varying degrees. That's more a testament to how dependent we humans are on the Internet now, not an indictment of the iPad itself.
 
I wouldn't say worthless at all. I've had a gen1 iPad (sold it) and am looking to get another one, but the main reason would be for reading PDFs and some of the other myriad productivity and education-oriented apps it can run. The internet is something I surf on either my home machine, or my MBA. The internet not being supported on an iPad wouldn't stop me from getting one.
 
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