Well, I decided to bite the bullet and buy an ipad today. I have a friend that had a brain tumor removed, had a stroke, and can't seem to make his fingers work well enough to work the keys on his iPhone. I thought the iPad would be the answer to allow him to surf the web and view his email while in the hospital. I went into the Apple store, looked/played with one and decided to buy the 16 gb model. They didn't have it, so I was upped to the 64 gb model. I specifically told the salesman that I was running 10.4.11, and that I had upgraded to iTunes 9.0.3 about 6 weeks ago when I got my iPhone 3Gs. He said it should work fine.
The first thing I found when I got it home (I live about 1 hour away from the Apple store) is that it won't even turn on without being connected to iTunes. Right out of the box you have to connect it to iTunes. Not a problem, got out the cable and plugged it into my USB hub. Then I find out iTunes 9.0.3 isn't good enough, I need to upgrade to 9.1. 20 minutes later I hook it up to 9.1 then is says The iPad cannot be used because it requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later.
I can't believe you can't even turn the thing on without hooking it up to a computer...it's supposed to be a stand alone device. Only Apple could get away with selling a device that requires you to upgrade your hardware, and your software in order to use it. I'm still trying to decide whether to return it, or let the Apple store get it up and running for my for my friend to use.
