College: Having a laptop and iPad a good combo?

[akimoriRyuuji]

While my college days were pre-iPad, I have attempted to use an iPad as a note-taking device in continuing education courses and also for notes in general.

My advice? You will need a laptop to go along with it.

For short bursts of notes from meetings or the like, the iPad should be OK. If you get an external keyboard, it should be fine for taking notes in any situation, but unless you're really good at using the touchscreen keyboard (which is very easy to make mistakes on, especially if you're used to using physical keyboards), you should stick with the laptop.

One big advantage for students is that the iPad doesn't multitask as well. There's no hiding a webpage window aside your notes; by the time you switch from Safari to Pages, you've missed what you're going to write down, and you'll realize how dearly you pay for that early on.

The touch keyboard, more difficult editing (no mouse/trackpad), and more limited file management are what prohibit me from using my iPad more often. It mostly gets taken along when only small amounts of text are going to be entered. Everything else goes to a laptop.

For writing papers and larger assignments, a laptop is almost a necessity. Yes, it is possible to write the papers or complete the projects on an iPad, but you'll need lots of patience.

I do like my iPad for books. If you can get copies of the books you need on the iPad, it's worth it to have the iPad next to you while you use the laptop.

Calendars and other organizational tools are about equal.

We all know, of course, that you aren't going to be doing academics 24/7 at college. The iPad is the better entertainment machine--I use mine for Netflix, books, maybe an occasional round of the old SimCity Deluxe.

IF I WERE YOU...I'd get an iPad (larger size) and an 11" MacBook Air. A lot of people think the screen on the 11" is too small, but I've used two of them over the last five years and they've both been fine, even for producing page layout work (it's small but doable; of course, I was raised on 9" Mac Classic screens). Use them as a tandem and find what works best for you.

If money is an issue and you can only get one, however, the laptop is going to be a better fit for college overall if only for the ease of word processing.

Just wanted to point out that multi-tasking is coming this fall.

 

[nanogirl21]

Honestly, ever since I got my 2015 13" Macbook Pro my iPad Air has been pushed to the side. I don't carry my iPad to school anymore because the laptop is very light and portable. The battery last all day so carrying a charger isn't a question/problem for me. I take notes much faster on the laptop with less mistakes than the Air. However, being able to draw charts and graphs during lecture is helpful. I cannot deny that! I have gotten around this by taking a photo of whatever chart/graph the professor draws, add it into my document on my laptop, and write notes or whatever else needed around the photo.

I am currently on iPhone 5S. When my phone update rolls around (January 2016) I plan to go to a larger size phone and ditch the iPad completely. The phone really does everything that I use my iPad for. I use the iPad for car ride games (farmville, angry birds, candy crush mainly) and viewing excel documents on the go. Surfing the net and hard core games I don't really do on the iPad. If I need to do a quick search when I am out somewhere the phone is totally capable of doing that. As far as using the iPad for movies... I used to do this, but I stopped. Why? I found myself watching movies only when I was home. If i'm home watching a movie why not watch it on the larger TV? Yes, I did load some movies on the iPad for long vacation road trips. However, I found myself playing my games and listening to my music more. If I did want to watch a movie on a long road trip 10 times out of 10 I would have my laptop and could watch it on there (on a larger screen at that).

At the end of the day to me (and mainly for my needs) the iPad isn't worth it especially if you have a laptop and newer larger screen iPhone.

 

[yoimrae]

It would be a great combo. I'm an engineering student and I use MacBook and iPad mini. I do my research,programming, presentation stuffs on my macbook. I use my iPad mini for PDFs, reviewers, research(if i'm lazy to use my mac)