- I have been using a 12.9” iPad since march 2018 for exactly these purposes. It has worked very well. - the better notes apps ( I use goodnotes ) are functionally much better than paper, in that they make it easy to move areas of writing about and erase things you dont want, and add arbitrary pages ( with arbitrary templates ); searching my ( fairly awful) handwriting works well so finding things again is much easier. - writing on the iPad with the Apple Pencil is not like writing, use the blunt end of a Bic on a flat piece of glass and you will have the feeling exactly. On the other hand, there is little lag so you can create handwriting that is just like what you’d make on paper with a pen. There’s no good equivalent of a fountain pen. -overall I would never willingly go back to pen and notebook, and I was very picky about good notebooks and pens. - There are some amazing PDF annotation apps, and for typographical markup it’s a dream. - Reading A4 pdfs is as good or better than reading a printout.Plus, search. Minus, flipping through. (Bearing in mind i typically print out 2up double sided, but still.)

- Still, my iPad is now > 5 yrs old. The battery life is reducing and the backlight is showing its age. I am tempted to try the Remarkable tablet instead of buying the new iPad, in part because I think you need the big screen for all this to work - but Apple doesn’t make the iPad equivalent of the 15” MBA; in other words the big iPad is overpowered and thus overpriced for my use case. The Remarkable doesn’t have a lot of iPad’s functionality, but it is designed to be a notepad and pdf annotator and the writing experience is said to be very close to pencil and paper.

(It has also turned out that carrying a thin A4 device is easier than carrying a thick A5 notepad, but obvs YMMV ).

Hope these notes are somewhat useful!