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Editor’s note: this bag was provided to me for review purposes, and is a pre-production unit.

Cavernous, that’s the word I would use to describe this travel backpack and shoulder bag. To give you a better sense of what I mean, I had to triple the amount of clothing I would normally pack for my trip, in order to make the bag feel somewhat full and to keep my stuff from sloshing around the bag.

Even with all that extra clothing, there was plenty of room to spare. I typically don’t open with thoughts on the size of a bag, but that’s the most striking part of this bag. It’s big. It doesn’t feel big on my back, or even heavy, but it looks big and packs even bigger.

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I purchased the 9.7″ iPad Pro to be a couch computer and note taking machine, but also to be something I could easily take with me on short trips, or to the coffee shop. Which means I needed a keyboard for it, and given how much I love the Smart Keyboard Cover on the larger iPad Pro, it was an easy decision for me to buy it on the smaller iPad Pro as well.

I’ve now spent some time using it and I find myself missing the larger keyboard with every keystroke.

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I wake up when the kids get up every morning, which means my schedule is never set. I can’t set a reminder to brain dump at X time, because I want to sleep as late as I can. (Big fan of waking early, but with two small kids it doesn’t work well for me right now.) I’ve also long complained about how slow it can be to add tasks to OmniFocus, and how much better 2Do handles this, but even 2Do isn’t low-friction enough in the groggy mornings.

I really like to dump everything out of my brain, and into to 2Do while I sip my morning coffee. But I also needed a better way to handle this.

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Over the weekend I downloaded as many “handwritten notes” apps as I could find on the App Store to test and find what might be the best for using my 9.7″ iPad Pro as a notepad while I work. I was planning on writing one of those posts where I go through them all, but after searching hard and testing dozens, there’s none which I have found good enough to talk about.

There are some promising apps, like Notability, Noteshelf, Notes Plus, Notepad+ — but they all have a fundamental flaw. For some reason each of these apps try harder to replicate what you would get from a paper notebook, than to take advantage that they are digital.

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When the 9.7″ iPad Pro was announced there were a lot of people asking me if I was going to get it. My answer stayed annoyingly consistent: I’m waiting for an iPad mini Pro — one that works with the Apple Pencil. My thinking being simple: I’d like to have another iPad which could lie flat on my desk and replace paper notebooks with the use of apps and the Apple Pencil.

Further, I would like a smaller iPad for plane flights and hanging out around the house. I know that seems silly to some, but the 12.9″ iPad Pro is very large and unwieldy for some handheld use cases. Yet I wouldn’t trade it for any other device out there. If I had to pick just one device, it would be the 12.9″ iPad Pro — I use it more than my iPhone at this point, though, I thankfully don’t have to make that choice.

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I recieved a pre-production version of the Aer Travel Pack to review and check out while the Kickstarter campaign is going. This is my first interaction with Aer bags, despite long looking at their interesting Duffel pack, and my first impressions of the brand are very good.

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When I purchased the GORUCK 10L Bullet Ruck, I thought I had found the perfect combination of backpacks to own: 10L Bullet Ruck, GR1, GR2. These three bags covered 99% of my bag needs and it felt good. Then I decided to switch to the iPad Pro as my full time computer, and I found the iPad Pro (12.9″) doesn’t fit in the Bullet Ruck.

Now I had a gap once again at the bottom of my bag sizes — which also happens to be my most frequently used bag size. So I began trying a lot of different bags out to find one more compact than the GR1, but mostly I just kept taking the GR1 as everything I tried just didn’t feel right.

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