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Comment by dman | Hacker News Reader

Pen support should translate into large traction in the education market - any reasons why you think this is not happening?

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I was at uni in 2003-2006.

I had a tablet PC, convertable kind, Toshiba.

I was a 'freak' for having such a device, but doing an engineering degree, it was perfect. Equation I scribble down to LATEX yes!

One note is still my favourite note taking program, frankly puts evernote to shame.

I noticed I was the only one in a class of about 200 with one. 3 years later that had changed to eight, based on people asking me.

These things were expensive, I was lucky enough to get some grants for being dyslexic.

I honestly think they are great devices, battery life is now adequate, ultimately a Pro would be my go to university machine, enough power for any engineer that didn't require a rack. Great note taking.

However the price is objectionable. Most uni students I know would waste money on an iPad. Most people who buy iPads don't want a real computer, and RT offers little in apps they use. Outlook?! Why do they want that for their simple emails, its too complex.

Same here, I was the only one at my MBA school 2003-2005 with a pure slate tablet PC. Pen computing is awesome not just for note taking but also for business apps like excel and powerpoint. Anything that requires a lot of precise clicking across different areas of the screen works easier with a pen. Due to Microsoft's utter failure at marketing, nobody has any idea about this. Even web browsing is great with a pen. Actually much easier to browse the web and hit small links and buttons with a pen tablet than with fat fingers on an iPad or phone.

Should it? Outside STEM, a traditional laptop works better for taking notes. Inside STEM, well it's a crapshot whether any given professor will be okay with your bringing in a tablet to take notes on. $1,099 is a lot of money for a device that you can't necessarily bring with you to class.

I hate that I can't use my laptop for notes in most of my STEM classes- not because the professors disallow it, but because there's simply no equation editor that I can use quickly and efficiently enough to take notes with. I tried latex, but it just requires a few too many formatting keystrokes and isn't WSYISYG enough to do on the fly (at least for me).

I'd be pretty happy with a digitizer, I think, but I wouldn't be able to stand all of the other little quirks of the surface.

For typing equations quickly, I found that a quick (not so pretty) ascii-art notation was fastest. I would transcribe them to latex later.

I only did that for a year or two before I decided that laptops and note-taking in general were counterproductive and switched to never taking notes at all. I still occasionally took notes on my own time while reading the course material, but I found that paying closer attention instead of trying to write things down ultimately worked better.

windows has an app that's surprisingly not publicized a lot called math input panel which allows you to input equations quite easily in other programs like word or onenote.

Check this out:

http://webdemo.visionobjects.com/home.html#equation

I found Word's equation editor (2007 onwards, not the crippled MathType before) very good for real-time typing of math in class. It's quite close to LaTeX when it comes to symbols, smart enough to use / for fractions or convert ² to a superscript 2, etc. and generally requires far fewer braces because spaces or operators are used to separate tokens, e.g. a^15+4 yields 𝑎¹⁵ + 4 because it makes more sense than 𝑎¹ 5 + 4 (what LaTeX would make of it). It also features WYSIWYG build-up of the equation as you type.

Apple mindshare dominance?

(Apple has a very long history in the education space, and now that is paired up with some truly exceptional products. It's a potent mix, at least in theory. In practice, well, you get the LA school district iPad catastrophe...)

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