Nick

lol, and yeah, I truly hate the Apple Pencil, not only for not being user serviceable, but for not having an off switch, meaning that parasitic drain will relatively quickly destroy that battery if you don't keep it charging every day

shout out to the logitech crayon for having a fucking off switch

Note: I am definitely not a normal person lol. But I love my iPad. It's like a very middle one? Like, an Air from the previous generation I think? More than $200 but certainly not one of the "pro" models that costs laptop money.

Some data points:

• I don't have a keyboard cover for it, or generally use it as a pseudo-laptop. (I do have some bluetooth keyboards that I can and occasionally do use with the iPad on a table)
• A lot of what I do with it is, like, read in bed, or plop it down to play videos while I make coffee or something.
• Probably reading manhwa and manga is the thing I do the most on it? And arguably a large screen e-ink device would be better for the manga, but manhwa is (a) color, which e-ink is just sort of starting to get to, and (b) continuous scroll, which I think we are a ways out still from e-ink being good at. Obviously continuous scroll manhwa is designed for phones, but it's a lot nicer to read on the iPad than on my phone. (See below)
• To the extent that I do use it as a "laptop replacement," an actual laptop would kind of suck more because I don't type on row-staggered keyboards anymore, so the whole keyboard part of the laptop is redundant except as a space to house internals.
• The most "productivity" things I do with the iPad are really more like paper substitutes or second monitor substitutes, where the iPad is letting me do something in addition to what I'm doing on another whole computer.

I guess in many ways, the iPad is less of a laptop replacement for me and more a replacement for a big phone. My phone is an iPhone XR, which was the smallest reasonable-to-buy iPhone I could easily get ahold of at the time that I last needed to buy a phone. I do not like the ergonomics of big phones for one handed use, and they're annoying to carry. If I'm going to opt for a larger screen device that's hard to hold, may as well go for something that has a nice big screen. So probably a lot of the things I like to do on my iPad, other folks would use their bigass phone for.

Now, iPadOS super blows, and there's a very reasonable case to be made that instead of an iPad I should have bought a Microsoft Surface, with which I could run more real useful software and do ad blocking and shit. But as an object and in use, the iPad has given me a truly surprising amount of joy.

(The other argument is maybe that I should get a folding phone? If I thought I wouldn't immediately break it, that would have some appeal.)

if you have an ipad and want to occasionally use a stylus on it, get the logitech one rather than the apple pencil

The apple pencil must be constantly magneted to the ipad on a nearly daily basis for the tiny, non-replaceable battery in it not to fail and leave you with a lil white brick

The logitech one has, in addition to built-in charging, an off switch. Amazing. It's not as good b/c you don't get the pressure sensitivity stuff, but it doesn't just die due to sheer perverse user hostility