Another thing to consider, apple pencil is heavy and need to charge. S Pen is lightweight, and no charging required.

I switch from Ipad pro 12.9" to S9 Tab purely because of the pen, really. Apple pencil is too heavy for my small hand (backweight) and for longer writing session.

The ipad pro itself is nice, no issue for me. I have samsung phone and windows laptop - so it's no brainer for me to switch to android tab.

Edit to add: If somehow anyone feel the S-Pen is too slim, we have choices to use other EMR powered pen, like WacomOne, Lamy EMR, Staedtler Noris Digital (they have slim and jumbo size)

^This! Writing on a Samsung tablet is such a better experience than an iPad for the reasons stated, plus it uses Wacom's EMR digitizer technology. Handwriting looks and feels better with it, and as was said above, no charging your S Pen.

Well which do you like more: Your iPhone or Laptop?

The S8U & S9U are nice yet it seems most end up with the S8+ or S9+ simply because it's easier to use as a tablet.

For note taking you don’t need a 14.6 inch tablet

Fr, if it were me, I'd just take the regular s9 just for the size of it. And only consider the s9+ if i need it with a keyboard.

No, 14.6 is exactly what i need for note taking as a med student. I almost always have it in multiwindow, with a textbook/lecture slides/video lectures etc. And even if not, the bigger canvas is just better. I owned the ipad 9.7 then ipad pro 12.9, now s9 ultra 14.6

I own both, media consumption is my main use, I barely touch the ipad, but being that you're student the ipad may be better for note taking, specially with the aspect ratio, you don't realize how big the s ultra is until you try to use it on portrait mode, it looks ridiculous (in a good way) compared to the ipad pro.

Both have pros and cons. S9 ultra is paper sized, makes reading articles and PDFs nice. iPad has overall better and more polished apps for note taking and so forth as well as other academic apps. Highly recommend liquidtext for a very cool note taking off marking app. Office is solid on both, although last time I checked, using a mouse on iPad was a subpar experience. For Android, Samsung notes is pretty solid though and should fit most people's needs - combine with OneNote as needed.. Also, I really like Samsung's workflow and multitasking options - from easy to manage clipboard, shortcuts with one hand plus, smart capturing objects in pictures, etc. A lot of useful options for student work. I personally hate the iPad 'file' system - but if you have apple icloud, less of an issue. Dex on android is pretty amazing and a solid laptop experience - plus Samsung tablets and Windows tablets communicate with other pretty well. You have more stylus options on android (Wacom one and staedtler pencil are good choices, 30 bucks each). I personally wouldn't pay for a keyboard cover on either one, would rather put that money to solid portable keyboard - either a cheap generic 30 dollar bt keyboard or a nice low profile mechanical keyboard like nuphy.

iPad Pro 12.9in. I've tried the S8 Ultra for 2 semesters, and while I loved almost everything about it, note taking apps are subpar. There are plenty of people who love Samsung Notes and the other alternatives, but you just won't get an app like GoodNotes that does it a lot better. Not to mention you already have an iPhone, so that is a plus. Now my preference for GoodNotes is because all my math classes. I need to draw diagrams and graphs and everything you can think of. I used it for precalc, calc 1, calc 2, discrete math, linear algebra, prob and Stats, etc. GoodNotes makes everything "prettier" and neat looking, even if you have mostly chicken scratch. If you don't care for much of that, S9 Ultra should be perfectly fine. Also, it was TOO big actually, an S9+ would probably do. And for other classes, I just type into obsidian.

Goodnotes comes preinstalled on the Tab S9 series with one free year...