the ipad air m2 retired eleven planners and one of them was mine

Priya K. sent me a photo of her grocery list last may, handwritten on an ipad, with the caption "I have become my mother." I replied with a voice note that was just the sound of me ordering one. That is a true story about how I make decisions, and I am not proud, and here we are anyway.

the honest bit, receipts included

I paid $799 for the 13 inch m2 air in blue, at launch price, may 2024. Then $129.99 for the apple pencil pro, because it does not come with one, which remains the most apple sentence ever written. Then a $22 case with a pencil loop, purchased at 1am in a state I will describe as soft. Total: $950.99 and the feeling of being a person who has her life together.

Also, plainly: this tablet was discontinued in march 2025 when the m3 air replaced it at $599. If you are buying today, do not pay launch price for a discontinued one, unlike a blogger you know.

what i actually care about, in order of care

The 13 inch screen is the whole point. 600 nits, fully laminated, so the pencil tip touches glass that feels like it is not there. I sketch wireframes on the couch with my knees up and it is the closest thing to paper that also plays spotify. It weighs 1.36 pounds, which means my tote bag stopped filing complaints and started accepting new tenants.

60hz, again, forever. The one complaint you will see in every review, and it is correct. After a 120hz phone the scrolling has a faint drag to it, like pushing a shopping cart with one wobbly wheel. For drawing it does not matter at all. For scrolling my bank app it matters to exactly me.

The pencil pro squeeze is a toy and I use it constantly. You squeeze the barrel and it haptic-buzzes like a tiny purring cat, and rolling it switches tools. The eraser is the flat end. $129.99 is a lot for a pencil, and I have already accepted this about myself, in the same way I accepted the eleven planners.

128gb base storage fills up at the speed of a shopping cart going downhill. The system takes a bite out of the box, then procreate, then 4k video I keep for reasons I cannot defend. I live in the cloud now, mostly fine, occasionally a betrayal when a flight has no wifi and my sketchbook is "not downloaded."

The front camera moved to the long edge and this is somehow emotional. It is centered in landscape now, so video calls look like a person looking at you instead of a person looking at your left ear. The rear 12mp camera shoots 4k at 60 and I mostly use it pointed straight down at paper, scanning things flat, which is the least dramatic possible use of a camera and my favorite one.

Battery is one calm charge a day. Around ten hours of real drawing and writing, and I charge it overnight next to the bed like a tamagotchi. The usb-c port does 10 gigabits and drives a monitor, so twice it has been my whole desk.

Touch id lives in the top button. No face id, and honestly the fingerprint works from more angles than my face does.

a tangent about handwriting 🥲

Here is what I did not expect: my handwriting on glass is worse than on paper, and I found this out during a client call where I scribbled "refigl" instead of "refill" and then could not read my own note out loud. The pencil tries so hard to be a pen. There is a setting for palm rejection and a setting for double tap and there is no setting for me. My mom saw the tablet on the kitchen table during thanksgiving planning and said "so the paper won," and I said "the paper is retired," and we both knew.

The eleven planners are in a drawer under the winter scarves. I checked last week. They are fine. They are better than fine, they are free from me.

the soft landing

I keep meaning to build the linked freeform boards for work the way our lead does, the ones with little arrows between frames, but every time I open it I just

The truest thing: this is the nicest object I own for sitting with an idea, and it lives on the couch, and I think that is where ideas live.

ava