Take Notes On Tablet, Priced Before You Buy One

A reMarkable Paper Pro starts at $629. Their standalone Marker is $79. Add those and you get $708.

The bundle with the upgraded Marker Plus in it is $679.

So the better pen, bought as a bundle, costs twenty nine dollars less than the basic pen bought separately, which is the sort of thing you only notice if you sit and add up a store page. That's the shape of this whole question. To take notes on tablet you're making a hardware purchase, and the search results know it, because Best Buy, Amazon and Forbes all rank for this term alongside the app roundups.

Direct answer. The cheapest credible entry is a base iPad at $449.00 with Apple Notes, which is free and already installed. E-ink devices start higher, around $629 for a reMarkable, and what you're paying for is a screen that can't show you anything else. Prices below came off each manufacturer's own store pages on 28 July 2026, and one important number wasn't on any of them.

The Devices, What I Could Actually Price

Here's what the store pages gave me. Where a figure is missing, it's missing because the page didn't publish it, not because I got bored.

The base iPad at $449 undercuts everything else on that list by at least $180, which surprised me, because the e-ink devices are marketed as the focused, minimal option and they cost more than the general-purpose computer.

Apple's Pencil pages are the frustrating part. Their comparison page lists every model and exactly which iPad each works with, in genuinely useful detail, and publishes no prices at all on the pages I could load. The shop URLs I tried returned 404s. So I can tell you that the base iPad takes the Apple Pencil (USB-C) and the Air and Pro and mini all take the Apple Pencil Pro, and I can't tell you what either costs. Check it in your own store, in your own currency, since Apple's pages localise.

That gap matters more than it looks. A stylus is not optional for handwriting, so every iPad row in that table is incomplete by exactly one unpublished number.

The Bundle That Costs Less Than Its Parts

reMarkable's store is the only one in this comparison that publishes every accessory price, which makes it the only one where you can do the arithmetic.

The first row is the one worth acting on. If you were planning to buy the device and the cheaper marker, the bundle with the more expensive marker costs less. I checked that twice because it reads like an error and it's just how the pricing lands.

The rest of the accessory list runs to $89 for the Book Folio, $229 for the Type Folio, $19 for marker tips and $19 for a cable.

Also worth knowing before you commit, their page mentions that anyone without an active subscription gets a 50-day free trial when pairing a device to their account. There's a subscription called Connect. I couldn't find a page that published its price, and the support URL I tried came back 404, so treat the subscription as a real thing with a cost I haven't verified.

The Accessories Are A Second Purchase

Something I'd never seen laid out is what the add-ons cost as a share of the device, which changes how you read the sticker price.

The reMarkable Type Folio is $229 against a $629 device. That's 36% of the machine, for a keyboard cover. It's also more than half the price of an entire base iPad, which costs $449 and comes with a full app ecosystem and a colour screen.

The Book Folio at $89 is 14% of the device. Marker tips at $19 are consumable, which is a category of ongoing cost that no LCD tablet has, since a plastic nib on glass lasts far longer than a felt-style tip on textured e-ink.

I'm not saying any of that is bad value. A folio that turns a note tablet into something you can type on is genuinely useful, and consumable tips are the price of a paper-like feel. I'm saying the honest budget for an e-ink note setup is the device, plus the marker, plus a folio, plus tips forever, and the number people quote each other is only the first of those.

E-Ink Or A Screen

One of the pages ranking for this search argues that a dedicated note-taking tablet beats any software running on a general-purpose one. I think that's right and I think the reason usually given for it is wrong.

The reason given is the writing feel. Textured surface, no parallax, no glare. All true, and all a matter of taste that you cannot evaluate from a spec sheet or a blog post, mine included.

The real reason is subtraction. An e-ink note tablet cannot show you a notification, and an iPad can. That's the entire product difference and it's worth more than any stylus specification, because the failure mode of taking notes on a tablet isn't bad handwriting, it's opening something else.

The counter-argument is just as strong and it's about money. A $449 iPad does note-taking plus everything else a tablet does. A $629 reMarkable does notes. If you already own a tablet, the software route costs you between nothing and $79.99 a year depending on which app you pick, and the hardware route costs you six hundred and change plus a new thing to keep charged.

A Device That Can't Do Anything Else

I don't own an e-ink tablet, so I can't tell you how the Marker feels, and I'd distrust anyone who claims a review settles that for you.

What I do have is a related experience. I've shipped seven digital products priced between $29 and $49, and essentially all the writing happened in a plain editor with nothing else on the screen. That wasn't a principled choice about minimalism. It was that everything else on the machine was more interesting than the work, and the only reliable fix I ever found was reducing what was reachable.

So the reMarkable pitch lands for me even though I've never bought one. Paying six hundred dollars for a device whose main feature is an absence is completely rational if the absence is the thing you keep failing to create yourself. Whether it's rational for you depends entirely on whether your notes actually fail for that reason, and plenty of people's don't.

The cheaper version of the same idea, and the one I'd try first, is putting an existing tablet in a mode where nothing can interrupt you and seeing whether that fixes it. If it does, you've saved $629. If it doesn't, because you'll just turn the mode off, that's genuinely useful information about yourself and the expensive device might be the answer.

Questions That Come Up

Do I need a tablet at all to take notes? No. Paper works, laptops work, and the honest case for a tablet is handwriting plus PDFs plus portability in one object. If you type your notes, a tablet is a worse laptop.

Is an iPad or an e-ink tablet better for university? iPad, on price and flexibility, and it's not close if the budget is fixed. Base iPad at $449 plus a free app covers lectures, textbooks and coursework. The e-ink option makes more sense for someone who reads long documents daily and already owns a laptop.

Does the app matter more than the tablet? Less than the roundups suggest, since the free apps are good now. Apple Notes is included, OneNote is free across every platform. The paid apps buy specific things like handwriting search and transcription, covered in the Notability versus GoodNotes comparison.

What about a Windows tablet? Different ecosystem with its own quirks, including a version of OneNote that went read-only in 2025, which caught a lot of people out. That's in the Microsoft Surface note taking piece.

Is the S Pen included with a Galaxy Tab? The buy page I loaded quoted $749.99 for the Galaxy Tab S11, reduced from $899.99, and said nothing about what's in the box. Check the box contents before ordering. There's more on the Samsung side in the Samsung notes app rundown.

Which iPad for handwriting specifically? The full pricing breakdown of the apps, and which iPad tiers unlock which pen, is in the best note taking app for iPad piece.

What I'd Buy

If you don't own a tablet, the base iPad at $449 plus whatever pen your store charges, and Apple Notes for free. Use it for a full term or a full quarter before spending anything else.

If you do own one already, buy nothing. Try the free app on it first, then a $11.99 a year upgrade if something specific breaks, and only consider a dedicated device once you know for certain that distraction is the problem rather than the habit.

The one purchase I'd think hardest about is the folio. Two hundred and twenty nine dollars for a keyboard cover on a note-taking device is a lot of money to spend making a writing tool into a typing tool, and if typing is what you wanted, you already own something that types. There's a broader cost picture across everything in this category in the productivity apps breakdown.