I’d really like to get an iPad.   My fingers, when they aren’t rehearsing iPhone gestures on a grand scale, stray toward my wallet.   No contact yet, no slide of embossed plastic against age-hardened leather.   I think I know why.

I couldn’t resist the iPhone when it was new.  Or the Mac Mini.  Or the Intel Macbook Pro.  Or the unibody MacBook Pro.   I do not regret those purchases, but still I wonder.  Should I have waited?  Within what seemed like weeks of each purchase there was an even newer model, a model with all the features I really wanted.   Not enough better, or faster, so that I had to buy, but marginally better, so that I found myself wishing, found myself regretting, a tiny bit of satisfaction leaching away each day.

If only I had waited.   Not serious waiting, the sort of waiting where I look up from my Compaq luggable to gape stupidly at a Windows 7 advert before turtling down to Wordstar again, but the sort of groaning, missed it by a few weeks waiting that isn’t productivity damning, but joy-sucking, like picking the wrong lane during rush hour.   The other lane isn’t moving that much faster, is it?  It sure looks like it from here.  A foolish thought, but there you go.

Perhaps this rapid refresh, persistent disappointment cycle is a misperception on my part.  I tend to buy after the fanboy-standing-in-line period and the seven-to-ten day wait vacuum, in that glorious, ephemeral moment of ‘get it in twenty-four hours’ just before the minor upgrade is announced.  Will you lure me in for the fifth time, Apple?  Probably.  But not yet.  Because you fat-fingered my reflexive buy button this time.

I have a Kindle which from day one possessed that most important of attributes, the ability to purchase and download a book at the airport.  Or the hotel lobby.  Or any other place where I have time to kill.  Time that seems to stretch long while I’m trying to connect my laptop to the ‘free’ or extortionarily priced wifi, only to snap back a millisecond before the boarding call is announced or the taxi shows up.   I’m still working up the guts to enter my credit card information when they call my row.

Not so with the Kindle.  It just works.  I can spend my time reading something new, not in repetitive, techno-exploratory-trial-and-error wifi hell.  The staged release of the iPad, the delayed availability of the 3G version, opened my eyes.  Even if I wanted the iPad I would have to wait.

The iPad launch offended me.  It was a violation of a fundamental sales law: sell what you have.  It is an illustration of my business relationship with Apple, exposed in a way that forces me to face it.  Imagine if I had seen the product roadmap for all the products I had purchased over the years and all those I hadn’t, with release dates, specs, and prices all neatly spelled out.

I’d still be hunched over the Compaq.

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Where’d I put my wallet?