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Comment by jtolds | Hacker News Reader

i spent a long time researching various writing devices, such as the reMarkable, the microsoft surface, the ipads, wacom, etc., and the ipad (in my case, the non-pro) at the time at least really had the best ratio of pixel latency to price. it really wasn't even a competition. writing on an android with slow pixel latency or something is really jarring, but yeah, the apple pencil setup is truly great.

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What makes an ipad with the pen better than a microsoft surface book or surface pro? I'm looking at buying pro 7 or book 3 for taking notes in onenote and whiteboarding.. so these is definitely a relevant post to me.

I haven't looked into it recently but yeah, like I said I was trying to find the sweet spot with pen latency and price. The iPad was cheap (~$350) and had great pen latency, whereas the reMarkable was not cheap or as full featured, and the Surface was also not as cheap and had reports of bad pen latency (e.g., see https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/e8kho9/if_there_is... for an example)

Update: It appears the situation has improved across the board. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/the-remarkable-2-is-an-ipad-p... says 20-21ms is pretty standard now.

I agree that the non-pro iPad delivers the best pen experience for price. Surface Pro’s pen is pretty good, but IMO it is slightly worse than the iPad, while being more expensive.

Software wise, the iPad has way more pen focused productivity apps than Windows. On Windows, you are mostly limited to OneNote. Although Drawboard is pretty good for annotating PDF’s.

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