I'm seeing an increase in college students in Japan with iPads and Apple Pencils. And most of the visiting students from other countries have them for sure.

Yeah it's amazing how many iPads + Apple Pencils students have these days. I notice this in Thailand universities as well.

Almost all of the students in the undergrad engineering courses I teach seem to use them. 10 years ago, I had a Samsung Note tablet that was great for coursework: it made comparatively trivial the then-daunting task of keeping all your coursework organized and having it with you when you needed it. It was great back then, and now they're significantly cheaper with Apple. If the Samsung options were comparably cheap and sporting reading-friendly screen ratios, I would've skipped Apple altogether.