Q: Someone told me that a person who buys an iPad needs to have a Mac computer as well for updates, etc. Is that true?
– Carmen
A: Not at all.
The iPad and all of Apple’s media devices can be used with Windows in much the same way as with a Mac. iTunes is available for Windows and provides basically the same features and management capabilities of the Mac version. In fact, it has not been necessary to use a Mac even with an iPod since the release of the original third-generation iPod back in 2003.
Further, unlike traditional iPod models which had to be formatted for either a Mac or PC platform, Apple’s iOS devices—the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch—are completely platform-agnostic in terms of which computers you sync them with. You can easily move back and forth between a Mac and a PC, even loading different content from different computers and applying software updates on whichever computer is convenient.