Sadia Khaf

Why I bought the cheapest iPad

Sadia Khaf -

I had a low budget for a tablet but that is not the main reason why I bought the cheaper iPad over an expensive one.

I wanted to read books in digital format

But reading on my laptop was not convenient because I wasn't always carrying it with me on my bike rides to a park, or evening strolls. I thought of buying a Kindle but then again, I didn't want to have two seperate devices for reading, and note taking. And I'm not talking about the book notes, I'm talking about all of my lecture notes, my research, my creative writing, and this very blogpost that I'm currently handwriting on my iPad. So the obvious choice was a multipurpose tablet. The only question was, which one is the right one for me?

I had not yet been enslaved by the Apple ecosystem

The only Apple devices I owned before buying an iPad was just an iPhone XS and a 2017 MacBook Air. Yeah I liked the features of copy text/image on iPhone and past on my MacBook and vice versa, and occasionally I made phone calls on my MacBook instead of iPhone so that I can still keep working while on hold for 30 minutes with someone (something more common in Canada than I would have liked). But those were the conveniences that I could live without on my reading and writing tablet.

I watched a lot of YouTube

About digital tablets, note taking, and reading books on a tablet. One of the YouTubers who influenced my choice a lot was Ali Abdal. And he is kinda obsessed with the Apple products. Honestly I'm surprised why Apple hasn't hired him to do their events (which let's be honest, lost their charm after Steve Jobs).

My friend had a 1000$ Samsung Tablet

I used my friend's tablet a bunch of times just to get an idea of how it feels like to take notes on a tablet and honestly the stylus lagged so much. It was nothing like writing with a pen an paper. And I thought if a 1000$ tablet doesn't feel good, certainly a tablet less than 400$ isn't gonna. So I should buy the most expensive tablet right? Not necessarily.

From the online reviews and from Apple's own advertisements, I found that thier most popular iPad is their cheapest iPad, not the pro or Air or mini, just the regular old iPad. I dived deeper into the differences and I made a checklist of what I wanted to do with my digital tablet.

  1. Take Lecture notes
  2. Read books
  3. Listen to books
  4. Work on my re research (read papers, draw models etc. )

I used the process of elimination to take out the tablets I don't want.

→ Kindle: I could not use it for notes research.

→ Android tablets: I did not find one with fast enough stylus and fast enough synchronization of notes with PC.

→ iPad mini: screen size was too small to work on research.

→ iPad Pro: I did not need all that power because I wasn't gonna work on graphics design or movie editing on a tablet.

That left me with the iPad and the iPad Air. Both of them were equally good. And iPad could do every thing that iPad Air could do for me for a cheaper price tag. So I bought an iPad and the Apple Pencil first generation.

I attend French class online on my MacBook and take notes on my iPad during class. The teacher shares the PDF notes before each class, which I import into OneNote on my MacBook. And during class I take a lot of screenshots on MacBook that I paste directly on my iPad to highlight and annotate. So the copy and paste feature that I originally didn’t plan on using at all became one of my most used features.

Here's how I take notes on my iPad.

So far I have been extremely happy. I don’t use any fancy paid applications. Just the regular old Microsoft OneNote because I can use it on my PC as well as MacBook, not to mention my iPad and iPhone.

For reading books

I use the native Apple Books app. I imported all the books I previously had in PDF or EPUB format into Apple Books. For listening to books I either use the actual audiobooks or use the iPad's accessibility features of voiceover to read the book from the PDF or EPUB format since it doesn’t sound very mechanical and I am now used to it.

Pro tip:

In siri voice settings, I use British voice 2 with increased reading speed for listening to books and it sounds very close to natural. I fall asleep listening to a book that I was originally just reading in Books app, without buying the audiobook.

If you use another tablet for taking notes and reading books please let me know. And if you would like to know more about how I read books or take notes using my iPad, feel free to leave your questions in the comments.