| I bought an M1 iPad Pro (12”?) last year and feel about the same. The processor is overkill and the battery life suffers as a result. It’s bulky, not nice on my lap (w/ keyboard) and is heavier than the more capable MBA. It does have some redeeming features which stop me from selling it: + Excellent mini-LED screen (some bad ‘blooming’ effects though) + It’s highly portable without the keyboard + It’s great for weird locations, like watching something in the bath, or while cooking + Enables me to easily sign and fill forms without printing I am disappointed by the offerings for note taking with the pencil. I’m nearly through with a civil engineering degree and have had the iPad for 2 semesters. I thought this thing would be super handy for marking up plans, highlighting in textbooks, making hand-written notes in class… nope. I’ll read a pdf on it every now and then, but I find all of the other tasks too cumbersome to repeatedly perform on the iPad. Notes are annoyingly stored inside apps (goodnotes) until you manually export them. Goodnotes itself is not very ‘good’ either. It’s clunky and turns the device into a space heater. I cannot find a pdf/note-taking app that: + Doesn’t have intrusive menu bars that are permanently on + Has sane keyboard shortcuts + Can edit/markup pdfs in-place without ‘importing’ them + Has a smooth drawing feature. (Goodnotes is smooth. Apple default is crap) + Has drawing tools that are more than just making squares and circles + Has good support for equations and scientific notation (OCR or other interaction). Have any other science or engineering students found anything better than goodnotes or notability? |
Last I checked, you can markup PDFs in iCloud without importing / exporting, but YMMV.