People are asking me what I think about all the great new features loaded into iOS5. It is sweet of them to ask. By asking, they are implying that they think of me as one of those people who is always at the leading edge of things. I like to be thought of that way. Unfortunately, it isn’t true. Here’s the blog post to burst that bubble.

I haven’t upgraded to iOS5 yet. I tried to but I don’t have enough free memory on my laptop. More precisely, I no longer have enough free memory on my laptop to fully backup my iPad and iPhone, which is, in my mind, a requirement before installing a new operating system.

Not enough memory? How is that possible, you ask? Isn’t memory pretty much free these days. Yes and no. Here’s my situation:

I use an HP Pavilion with a 105 GB hard drive. I have only 2.25GB free. Most of the used space is occupied by music. All of the music on my laptop is currently also backed up on a 60 GB book. The rest of my music is on a 120GB external hard drive which I currently have no way to back up.

In order to free enough space to back up my iPad and iPhone, I will need to offload some or all of my music files onto the external hard drive. Since I have no way to backup that off-loaded data once it is moved, this option makes me very nervous.

Still, I’m planning to move it all over to the external hard drive and free up lots of space on my laptop so I can do backups, update operating systems and resume podcast downloads as well.

First, I’ve got to find time to move the files and then have iTunes map the files out again. Not much for me to actually do while this is happening, but I want to keep an eye on it in case there are problems.

Then the actual updates for iTunes, iPhone and iPad. That’s probably an hour or so of patiently waiting.

Simplest solution: get a new laptop with more memory. I’m eager to move from Vista to Windows 7 anyway. That, however, costs money, which is, by the way, in short supply these days.

So there you have it. The simple, sad but true reason why I haven’t upgraded yet. I expect to upgrade this weekend so I can once again be the kind of person people ask for an opinion on the swank new features hidden in the new OS.

And yes, I am fully aware that there is nothing in this post of sufficient import to set the world on fire. To my social activist friends, yes, I do realize that these are fake, First World problems. I say with all humility, “The First World is where I live.”