A few days ago, during Apple’s earnings call, CEO Tim Cook said that the iPad had experienced its most successful June quarter in “nearly a decade”. And IDC’s latest worldwide shipment figures also iterate Apple’s command over the tablet segment. Supporting demand for the device is its popularity among a range of users — fashion designers to graphic artistes, AR enthusiasts to students. And now that the new iPad comes with the company’s breakthrough Apple M1 chip, resource-hungry tasks, like video editing, have become a reality; multiple stacks on the timeline are easy-peasy.
What we wanted to find out is why the iPad is a hit among the youth, some of whom are opting for it over laptops. Is it the size, the powerful chip, longevity, the software experience or compatibility with other Apple devices?
“As a medical student, I read a lot of books, most of which are very expensive, each easily costing Rs 3,000 to Rs 4,000. Plus, there are many different subjects to study, 19 of them — medicine, surgery, ENT and so on. The PDF of the books are available online and these can also be bought by taking subscription of the authors. So, for one subject there can be, say, 10 books. Not every book has all the information about a topic. This means, I have to choose material from multiple books,” says Anuj Pachhel, a third-year MBBS student at Government Medical College, Nagpur.
Anuj Pachhel (left) is a third-year MBBS student with a popular YouTube channel and Radhika Kotak is a final year medical student with an Instagram blog. Both use the iPad to power their lives Picture: The Telegraph
Like Anuj, many choose the iPad for being easy on the eye and comfortable size. The medical student has as his lifeline an iPad Air (fourth generation), which has a 10.9-inch screen size, and multiple apps that help him cross-refer while making notes. “It’s a great size for reading. Add to this the ability of the Apple Pencil. We can take notes from a book directly by highlighting and there some great apps, like GoodNotes and Flexil. While reading a book, you simply highlight the text and it gets added to the notes, complete with hyperlinks, clicking which directly takes me to the page where the original text is,” says Anuj. “Usually when I read on other screens, I feel a strain on my eyes. That’s not the case on the iPad. Besides reading e-books, there are online lectures and apps for medical students. You may have heard of this app called Marrow. And then there is Unacademy. There are these apps which have some great lectures from top faculty members available online. Watching lectures on a bigger screen helps.”
When the iPad was first announced in 2010, there an explosion in demand for the device, with book publishers singing praise for the screen size while game developers started thinking of powerful titles. Since then, it has captured the imagination of people across different fields.
To make the device appeal to students Apple’s annual ‘Education Offer’ is there (currently live on Apple Store Online). For some students it has become their “best buddy”, like it has for final year medical student Radhika Kotak who uses an iPad Pro (2020). “I use the iPad for taking notes. In med school, there are hundreds of books to read and an enormous amount of information to remember and recollect. During examinations, we can’t go back to books, so notes have become a lifeline. First, it’s exhausting to have handwritten notes all the time, plus, living in a hostel, there is no space for anything much. It’s a small dorm room. Besides taking notes, I can easily add images to them, instead of wasting time drawing diagrams. The apps I find useful while taking notes are Notability and GoodNotes. The advantage Notability has over GoodNotes is that it can record. While attending a lecture, not only do I take notes but also record the lecture. In case I miss something in the notes, I can go back to the lecture,” says Radhika, who also runs a popular Instagram blog called Rad Mad Med Student (@radmed.co).
While Radhika runs an Instagram blog, Anuj has a very successful YouTube channel for medical students and he already has 286K subscribers. At the moment, for video editing his go-to device at the moment is a MacBook Pro while most of his photography is done on an iPhone 12 Pro. The MacBook Pro is also used to visit a few websites dedicated to 3D anatomy, like KenHub. But for other things it’s the iPad, which has impressed him with its battery life.
And seeing one student organise his or her life around the iPad, friends tend to do the same thing. “Seeing me use the iPad to make studies more organised, some of my friends have also got the device.” Radhika, whose introduction to the Apple universe was through an iPhone 6 many years ago, in fact, once went to a shop to buy a laptop but came away with an iPad. Now she combines it with an Apple Pencil and the Magic Keyboard. “I don’t need a laptop. I have one but it’s lying inside the cupboard. For many people, the iPad is enough. Some of my friends who are designers and artists, they make full use of the device. For me, the Magic Keyboard is easy to type on and has a very good trackpad,” says Radhika who loves med school and memes and as an introvert thinks that socialising is social media.
No wonder, the iPad has become the device of the pandemic. Be it just for staying in touch with friends and relatives over video calls, consuming media or taking care of all professional or educational needs, the iPad rules and is no longer the device that sits between a computer and a smartphone. After all, what exactly is a computer in 2021?!
