Slightly daft question - laptop or just an ipad?

[leghoul]

I have to do a fair bit of writing soon, and a research project involving use of excel. I also need to be able to make some kind of graphic images for a charity. However I killed my macbook (air) years ago with a drop of water, and since then have mainly been using an iPad Air 2 for everything + keyboard, and genuinely haven't missed the MacBook Air at all.
I have a rickety old windows 7 laptop that has an abysmal battery life and bad screen quality but great keyboard, but I am wondering what to do about my research project and whether I can get by using the ipad or whether now is a good time to get a new laptop. I have to have it portable as need to access and enter data while out. Thanks for any thoughts

Alternatively, as my screen is really quite broken on the ipad - would an iPad Pro be in any way more feasible for these tasks or is it the same as the Air with added expense and fancy pencil gadget?

We have never used anything other than a 'proper' computer, (office kind) though our grown up DS has a good laptop and phone, and he has done a 'Masters' and now coming to the end of a PhD on those, but also has big systems at Uni.

I assume you have watched the ipad Pro adverts (I must admit Apple are VERY slick on their publicity!) as you also refer to the 'fancy pencil' which does look very clever!

So if you can afford it, it should be a powerful resource to have. It looks like Amazon have good price, and John Lewis are often very competitive; make sure you compare available offers in detail, including support etc, to see EVERYTHING you get for your money. So prices go from £500 to £700.

(We bought our first computer in 1993, and it was over £2K and TINY in power compared to today's machines; the colour printer was £600, but that was the penalty for being an 'early adopter'!)

Thank you! I'd rather use a desktop but need it to be portable. Ah I am still undecided. I think I might find an ipad OK for research eg excel and not OK for a dissertation, so I am thinking of replacing the MacBook Air with an older version of MacBook Pro. It's just so expensive I'd rather go on holiday