For university, iPad will be much better device
Great note taking
Evernote note syncing
Two side app work enabling reporting and productive working.
Drawing and painting.
Email, browser all covered.
Most important: movies, games and music on iPP are incredible.
Notebooks are in past. If you need keyboard, you can have any variety of BT and iPP keyboards. Probably you won;'t need them
For OP's area this may not be the case. Seems to have an IT background/future interest.
Unless his college studies vary from the norm programming, databases, and at least a minimal coverage of Linux will covered in 4 years. This part of see the whole IT picture for 2 years...then decide what rabbit hole they follow Alice down. And no matter the rabbit hole chosen...topics do get revisited.
IPP is lacking in these areas in many ways. I am in this area work and continuing studies wise.
A good IDE/text editor on steroids will the best friend you could ever have in programming. Not much here iOS wise.
Databases I know of no full blown accepted, even open source, setup for iOS. Now we can argue a class might have a class db setup for this in the university network. Access when not in class, what you can actually do on it when in the class come into question. Among other questions. Want to really learn RDBMS...this comes from installing, configuring and administering your own.
Linux...this why I have several VM's on my MBP alone. Flavor variations, version variations, well covered. And windows servers in the fold as well. I use parallels to make my life easier with numerous testing scenarios.
they list Cisco stuff. At some they will make the call to go VIRL or GNS3 here, if not already there. VIRL is cisco's much enhanced simulator over the aged basic one they have had for years (forget the name, you get it from cisco academy downloads iirc). GNS3 is an open source alternative that has a very large user base. I have used GNS3 personally. I can get Cisco device IOS images from my infrastructure coworkers via our support contracts to load in.
None of these run in iOS currently. Nor will they ever most likely. They require deep system access iOS doesn't give out. And even a good spec'd laptop when you get the network sims mildly complicated they hit system resources pretty hard. I can get GNS3 to give my mid 15 15" MBP a good workout real fast.
MBP in this case seems the better option really. Or before someone says it....IPP but a decently beefy workstation/server running in background somewhere to remote into for this functionality. My take on that though is if you are remoting a system most of the time....you haven't replaced it really.
I remote at work a lot. But only because I am in 1 of 80 servers I support for maybe 20 minutes and on to other things. I am avoiding being in a cold and loud server room for 8 hours a day. 4 hour coding session (bug hunts can be fun)...I like my eyes too much to stare at even an IPP screen that long. Kind of why I have the nice big t-bolt display.
