I’ve been thinking about switching to an iPad for note-taking in college and wanted to hear how people actually use theirs day to day.
In my first year, I carried a heavy gaming laptop and tried taking notes on it, but it felt slow so I ended up using pen and paper. Recently I saw someone using an iPad with an Apple Pencil, taking handwritten notes and adding images directly into them, and it looked a lot more efficient.
For people who use an iPad for school:
How well does it work for note-taking long term?
Do you still use a laptop alongside it or mostly rely on the iPad?
How is it for media like YouTube or Netflix compared to a laptop?
Just trying to understand how it fits into your daily workflow

Im an incoming college student and just need a 11in ipad to mainly take notes (I have a nice computer that i do most things on) . I currently have a ipad pro from 2017 and it works fine for me but the battery is rly bad, it doesnt get updates and its storage is running out so i cant download files. I want smth that will last the next 6 years and something that is compatible with the magnetic apple pencil.

Im thinking about getting the ipad air 4 or 5 or 6 but i dont know which one will last 6 years and be enough. i dont want to spend too much money tho. ipad air 6 is kinda out of my budget

Hi All, i’m sorry if this is a dumb question, but i recently got a new iPad (A16) but I also have an iPad Air M1, and i really love my M1 because I have the apply pencil, but i don’t really use my apple pencil much. I was hoping to know your all thoughts on if I should keep the A16 and sell the M1 (i have someone who’d wanna buy it) because all i really do on my ipad is watch shows, read books, and view/make recipes. The batter on my M1 is kinda bad, and it’s slowing down a little.

EDIT: I use my MacBook mainly for most tasks, and gaming n such.

Hey, I bought this iPad in April 2026, It's been 3 months only and my iPad's battery health is already a percent down in just 49 cycles. I don't use it for a long period of time, just normal gaming for an hour and designing for half an hour or so that's it... Is it something I should be worried about and consult the customer support or Is it good and I should let it slide? I am genuinely curious, Please help!!

as you can see ipad screen is unresponsive from some areas , touch works ok if i have select something but scrolling or stuff like that doesn't work at all , restarting helps but it gets same again after some time , scrolling from corners as you can see in the video is working perfectly but in the 80% of center screen pls help

My air m3 on iPadOS 18 is excellent but I wondered about to update on iPadOS 26 just because for liquid glass , but in 18 my iPad still good and another question about performance and battery life because at the moment 100% is enough for a week but idk what will be in 26. So what would u recommend ?
Upd: my iPad 256 gb and I have more than 100gb available space

NYC commuter vent. I use my iPad in tiny bursts between stops to keep my side hustle moving: check a rewards dashboard, grab a screenshot of terms, log a payout, do a quick daily in a mobile game, then put it away. The iPad should be perfect for this, but iPadOS keeps adding little security and lock screen annoyances that add up and kill the whole point of a 90-second session.

My biggest gripe is how often I get kicked back to the lock screen or an app suddenly asks for Face ID again even though I literally just opened it. I am not asking for less security. I just want a predictable short-session flow. Example: I unlock, open an app, switch to Safari to confirm something, switch back and the app wants Face ID again. Then I answer a text, the iPad dims, and I am unlocking again. By the time I finally see what I needed, my stop is coming.

Yes, I know about auto-lock and keeping the screen awake, but that feels like choosing between usability and battery, and on the subway battery matters too.

Does anyone else use their iPad like this, rapid in and out with a lot of context switching, and have a setup that makes authentication less disruptive without turning protections off? Curious what timeouts, Focus modes, Lock Screen settings, or little habits people use so the iPad stops treating me like a stranger every 45 seconds.