iPad .... Apple keyboard and pencil too?

[dancemom]

Buying an iPad for my daughters Christmas, mostly for use at Uni next year. She's requested the iPad over a laptop.

Do I need to buy the apple keyboard and pencil or do other cheaper makes work with the iPad too?

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Assuming she will be wanting to take notes and will need to write essays etc my honest advice would be to ignore her and convince her to get a laptop.

If you don’t want to do that then yes 100% get a keyboard at the very least. The pencil depends on if she likes to do handwritten notes or digital artwork. If not - it is not too useful.

If you are considering iPad Air or Pro with one of the official keyboard cases and pencils, be prepared to spend far more in excess of what an Apple MacBook Air (M1) laptop would cost that would be a much more pleasant experience for essay writing etc.

ds has both an iPad and a windows laptop and uses both. He also has a monitor at home to attach laptop to.

iPad and pencil he says is brilliant for downloading slides and taking notes in lectures instead of having to print and organising multiple notepads and folders, but it is not a replacement for his laptop that is essential for writing reports and using uni software (engineering) that is not compatible with iOS. He spoke to his Uni before starting and they told him if he wanted to run the software for his course he would need a windows laptop.

He regularly works referring to lecture slides/lab notes on iPad, writing a report using his monitor, with another website open for references on his laptop screen. I guess it depends on her course how versatile an iPad with keyboard will be or if a laptop is essential for the university level reports/essay writing the will be required.

I haven't used the iPad keyboard so not sure how good it is for essay writing, if she is using Word, Excel etc she will only get the cutdown iOS app version which could make some things more cumbersome.