Will An iPad Help Pick Up Guys?

When my guy friends started offering to take my little puppy out for walks, I was confused. Who were they trying to attract with a tiny chi-chi dog? But then my friend explained it to me: any dogs, even small, fluffy ones like mine, are chick magnets. Sure, you might seem like you bat for the other team when walking a 5-pound chihuahua, but that makes you even more approachable by women, according to some screwy guy logic. Basically, dog parks were the grown-up equivalent of Sadie Hawkins dances: the only time when chicks would approach you.

So that got us thinking: Are there any surefire guy magnets? We decided to do a test with an Apple iPad in three different subsections of New York bars (inhabited by suits, tech guys, and hipsters respectively) to gauge the approachability of a single girl playing with the latest tech toy. The results were surprising, a little bit painful, and definitely ended with vomiting. Read on.

Test Area One: Joshua Tree, Murray Hill

The sports bar for suits, I hung out at The Joshua Tree from 5:30 till 7 pm without one person talking to me. At least that gave me time to explore the iPad’s functions which, since there was no Internet in the bar, was limited to me reading pre-downloaded books and playing Scrabble against the machine (I won three times). I bought two beers for myself and got up to leave. And that’s when the swarm started.

“Oh hey, do you like that thing?” a tall, dark-haired guy practically jumped across the room to ask me.

A guy next to me that I hadn’t noticed until right then snorted, “What would you rather have, your iPhone or this thing? This doesn’t even make phone calls.”

“Neither does a computer,” the first guy interjected.

“Let’s just say, you’re in a burning building and you can carry out either your smartphone, your computer, or this thing,” said the guy sitting besides me, who I noticed had both a laptop and an iPhone by his side, “which would you pick?”

And on and on it went. (First of all, obvious answer is your computer because it’s more expensive? So, you know, dumb question.) Turns out the guy on my right was a Google engineer, and spent another hour buying me drinks and telling me how much Apple sucked. You know, despite his Macbook Pro and iPhone. The second guy…don’t know where he went, probably got bored of talking shop when really all he wanted to do was start a conversation. After awhile I made my excuse and got up to leave when a suit by the door grabbed me for a cigarette. Maybe it was the three beers, maybe I felt the need to explain why I would never willingly go to a Murray Hill bar by myself on a Tuesday night, but I ended up telling him about the experiment, and despite being a sort of sleazy stockbroker, he had some good insight.

“Do you think it mattered at all that you were playing with an iPad? You were a chick, sitting by yourself, without any girlfriends to talk to. You could have been reading Mein Kampf and those guys would have hit on you.” Good point, though technically I think that the Google guy actually just wanted to shit on Apple products, not pick up girls. Then the stockbroker asked for my number, which signaled the end of round one.

Conclusion: Guys in suits will hit on anything, really.

Test Area Two: Central Bar, Astor Place

I showed up late to a Foursquare happy hour event, where I figured I could get at least some good techie feedback. Fortunately for me, founder Dennis Crowley was willing to go on record about the iPad. Unfortunately, I was already pretty hammered, so I think he said “____ that ____.” I do remember he said it in a Boston accent, which was sort of funny. Oh also, this bar had WiFi, which made the iPad about as convenient as having a giant iPhone. Sitting at a table of acquaintances and dudes I sort of knew, I ran into a logistical problem. It’s one thing to subtly check your phone for emails or whatever; it’s another thing entirely to have a book-sized gadget that you’re constantly fiddling with while trying to keep track of the conversation. Got the sense that tech guys were not impressed, and actually annoyed.

“So what does that do when you don’t have the 3G WiFi?” one of the developers asked me.

“Um, I can play Scrabble on it. Do you want to play Scrabble?”

“No.”

Conclusion: Don’t try to out-tech tech nerds with an iPad. You come off as desperate. Again, you’re probably better off with a copy of Mein Kampf. At least that’s a conversation-starter.

Test Area Three: Momofuku Ssam Bar, LES

Okay, I admit here I messed up. Depressed over how things went with the tech guys, I was planning to go to Williamsburg and do a subsection of hipster reaction to my toy. But my friend Sam had just come back to town and when we met up, wisely suggested that I eat something before I go out and drink anymore. So we went to Momofuko where he agreed to be my hipster judge (he lives in Greenpoint and is a web video editor, so it totally counts). Over pork buns and crab legs we toyed with the machine, which again couldn’t get a WiFi signal.

Our conversation (or some approximation thereof):

“Yeah, it seems like if you brought this to a bar in Brooklyn, you’d look like a show-off.”

“But it can hold all these books!”

“So why not get a Kindle?”

“Because it also has the Internet! Sometimes!”

And then I realized the problem: the suit at The Joshua Tree had been right all along. As anti-social as it is, the chances of being approached at a bar while reading a book are much higher than those when playing with an iPad. What I had mistaken for the novelty factor and a guy’s love of tech gadgets actually put a big red flag on me that said “Either I’m very busy doing work right now (so don’t bother me), or I am vain enough to blow my savings account on a toy that is basically a portable Scrabble set (so don’t bother me).”

What I had hoped to be a conversation-starter was actually a conversation-killer. My whole thesis of this article was ruined, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. Or maybe that was the raw crab legs after five beers and three shots. Either way, as Sam rubbed my back while I puked my guts out outside my apartment at midnight, I tried to think of one good purpose for the iPad that was missing from the smartphone or laptop. And as I hoisted my messenger bag on my shoulder and took a swig of seltzer to get the taste of vomit out of my mouth, I did appreciate how lightweight my bag felt without my MacBook in it.

Conclusion: Buy yourself an iPad if you want, but don’t do it for the guys. Do it because you can read hundreds of books, browse the net (sometimes), play Scrabble, and get really really drunk. And at the end of the night, you’re still only lugging around something that weighs, like, a pound.