I’m taking my laptop to college with me, and am considering purchasing a tablet as a supplement. I’m envisioning carrying around the tablet for taking notes in class (with a keyboard case), and mostly using my laptop for writing essays and doing anything that requires a larger screen.
My current laptop is a 2013 macbook air (13"). Not out of date by any means, but I don’t want to take handwritten notes, and I think it carrying it all over campus would get tiresome. Would adding in a tablet be worth the cost? I would be paying for this myself, since my parents bought my macbook and it’s still in perfect shape.
My S had the same macbook. Sometimes it’s helpful to have a windows PC, and while you can certainly dual boot, I got my S a Surfacebook. Looks like his macbook, except you can remove or turn around the kbd, and turn it into a tablet with very good notetaking capability. Expensive solution, but worked very well.
My other son had a very high end Windows laptop that is much less portable than a macbook, so he too went with Surface, but a cheaper model that was just a tablet, not useful as a primary laptop.
Both are happy with note taking on their Surface products.
While i own a tablet, I just carry my 15" macbook pro everywhere. It’s way more convenient to have all of my work and notes with me “just in case” and it’s not that heavy compared to my last laptop.
Have you actually tried typing long things on a tablet? I find it really irritating personally.
thank you all for the advice!
@philbegas I definitely agree that typing long things on the touch screen would be irritating. I’m going to test drive a few physical keyboards and see if I feel comfortable enough with those to use them regularly.
@saif235 Would you do things differently if you kept your work/notes in dropbox (or something similar) for accessibility on the tablet?
I should clarify I also find the lil keyboards for tablets irritating but that’s me personally. But yes definitely test them out first.
I prefer my Macbook pro as opposed to a tablet in certain situations but one thing I’ve noticed is in some of my classes laptops are almost banned as “distracting” to other students. For that reason I have a tablet as well since it’s much more inconspicuous. Another thing to take into account is the weight of the laptop vs the tablet. My macbook pro is a 2012 and it’s a lil hefty in comparison to the macbook air and newer versions of the pro. It’s definitely a personal preference and it’s a great idea to test run both.