Disruption for passengers and smugness to those who queried the idea, when some pilots on American Airlines cancelled flights after their iPads failed.
The airline says "several dozen" flights were grounded on Tuesday in the US after an "issue with a software application" on the Apple devices used by its pilots meant that navigation charts were no longer available.
Passengers inevitably took to Twitter to voice their frustration, with one passenger claiming the pilots eventually printed off the materials they needed in order to get airborne.
American Airlines was one of the first carriers to replace its existing paper manuals with iPads becoming an "electronic flight bag".
It was first given permission in September 2012 by the US's Federal Aviation Administration to make the change and eventually rolled out the devices to all crews the following year.
Both Alaska Airlines and United carried out similar changes around the same time.
American Airlines claims the move to electronic flight bags (containing navigation charts, aviation regulations and other paperwork) saves the carrier around $1.2 million a year in jet fuel.
The paper manuals and other materials weighed around 35 pounds for each pilot.
UPDATE:
The software crash has been blamed on an update to a Jeppesen-run application on the devices. Jeppesen is a Boeing-owned company which creates software for the aviation sector.