Apple Pencil Offers High Precision and Low Latency, Gains 30 Minutes of Use From 15-Second Charge

[kdarling]

Apple Watch, Apple Pay, Apple Music and now Apple Pencil. Has Apple lost its "i" ?

Yes, it seems that Cook is closing out the old "i" era of Jobs.

About time, too. Apple was actually late to using "i" (it began to get popular in the early 1990s with the rise of the Internet), and now they're way over a decade later than everyone else dropping it.

I agree that the "no stylus" quote has been used in the wrong context. He was talking about phones that need a stylus as an input device to navigate around. Making one as an option to write/draw/paint on an iPad makes perfect sense and was long over due.

Yep. Of course, you didn't really need a stylus with many of the pre-iPhone touchscreen phones. A fingernail worked too, plus you usually had a cursor pad as an alternative input for one-handed usage. There were even a couple of third party keyboards for WinMo that used the whole screen and were touch friendly.

So, by 2006, I mostly used my stylus to draw quick diagrams with dimensions before going to Home Depot. It was like always having a pencil and notepad around, along with optional voice recording to go with the notes.

They operate in a different way entirely, so it's not a valid comparison.

You need power to both sense the pressure and angle, and then to transmit that information back to the iPad.

The Wacom takes advantage of the fact that it already has an electromagnetic field behind the screen for position sensing, by allowing their pen to also use the field as its inductive power source. It's two things for the price of one.

The problem for Apple (and everyone else) is that apparently Wacom has a patent on that. So others must use a battery or a cable.

Impressed. This is much more than a stylus. As always, Apple has taken a boring product, intertwined their innovation and other product advancements, and turned out a stellar product.

And also as always, Apple is late to the party. However, better late than never. I do think that Cook is out to take sales away from Samsung, by having Apple adopt Samsung's best selling features. Multitasking, larger phones, and now an active pen. I wonder if the larger iPhone will eventually get a pen slot as well, like the Note phablet.

 

[frifra]

One should not forget that Steve Jobs said that a stylus would not be necessary for (common) usage and navigation.

The Apple Pencil is not used to navigate the ipad, it's for high precision drawing and art work.

 

[grmatt]

They never reversed course.
As much as I love to point out Apple's hypocrisies and slacking and whatever else they do wrong, they didn't reverse course.

2007 they presented the iPhone, not the iPad.
The Apple Pencil is for specific applications, not for the general use of the OS.

Glassed Silver:mac

Exactly. But that doesn't make a good story.

 

[Jett0516]

Where is this amazing technology for our iPhones?

 

[DVDxR]

What are the chances of this working with Air 2?

0% These types of devices require special digitizer hardware on the device to work, separate from the touch sensors. I have a similar pen for a Windows tablet and it won't work on other tablets at all.

 

[rowspaxe]

Maybe so, but at least it's nice to hear *something* about the product and its capabilities while everyone is throwing around opinions having never even used it.

You might conclude this is the first low latency pen on the market. But the ntrig and wacom surface pens are both excellent. Apple gets credit for adding tilt--it looks like a good product. How is your totally biased article poviding you with more information than the --somewhat biased--video provided by MR?

 

[DVDxR]

View attachment 580542

Where is this amazing technology for our iPhones?

Um, you're talking orders of magnitude difference in the power requirements. I have a digitizer pen for my windows tablet and it goes months on a AAAA (yes, quadruple A) battery. I'd bet that the Apple Pencil doesn't even have a battery, but uses a capacitor instead. That would be a LOT of charge cycles for a battery to go through.

 

[Manderby]

...This results in the Apple Pencil being very responsive, with almost indistinguishable latency, as seen in TechCrunch's hands-on video below.

As seen? I only have heard the guy say it. When I look at the video in full screen, for example at 0:40, 0:55 or 1:25, a cold shiver runs down my spine. That looks more like 200ms, maybe 100ms by my eyeball.

Wait for the specs, or any talk about 10ms is just blahblah.

 

[rowspaxe]

to me Apple Pen it too generic. Isn't there an S Pen that Samsung uses.

Pencil feels more like its for artistic purposes to me. Slightly different feel I would guess.

Isnt there a "53 pencil"

 

[mono1980]

I don't understand why this stylus needs a battery at all. Plus, you are sacrificing the iPad Pro's battery in order to charge it

It has it's own electronics. It's not just a piece of plastic. And the amount of power it takes to charge is so tiny it is negligible. The iPad Pro still gets 10 hours of battery life.

 

[billy the fish]

Android fanboys can shut the hell up about the stylus.

Because there's not a single crappy Android tablet that has a pen that's pressure sensitive AND precise (that tip radius) AND tilt sensitive.

Not one single option out there, for any price, from any manufacturer.

And when they come to imitate Apple, it will be typical Android quality: spec sheet marvels that don't work as intended.



LOL.

$100 bucks for a pressure sensitive, small radius, and tilt sensitive stylus is what?

It's the cheapest option on the market.

And it's not from a junky manufacturer.

wow, your angry fella, take a breath.. just asking the question, but these junky manufacturers you talk about.. would they be the ones who provide internal components for your beloved I products?

 

[jtrenda33]

It's not a stylus.

 

[Makosuke]

The pencil should be included with the iPad pro. 100 bucks for a stylus is outrages. The replacement pen for the surface isn't even that much.

I have a feeling one of the main customers for the iPad Pro is going to be businesses, a large fraction of which will probably have no interest at all in an art/CAD stylus.

Raising the overall price of the product (let's be optimistic and say by $50) to provide a "free" stylus when a pretty substantial fraction of users don't want one is a bad idea.

It's the same reason Microsoft doesn't include the $130 type cover with the Surface Pro 3 despite its similar (or much higher, for high-end versions) price tag. I'm actually a little surprised Microsoft includes the stylus (which retails for $50, though street price is closer to $35) by default.

 

[The Mad Kiwi]

As a pro illustrator this makes me salivate! especially the 2nd vid with the objective review!

Hopefully Abode have their end sorted, fingers crossed.

 

[apolloa]

They never reversed course.
As much as I love to point out Apple's hypocrisies and slacking and whatever else they do wrong, they didn't reverse course.

2007 they presented the iPhone, not the iPad.
The Apple Pencil is for specific applications, not for the general use of the OS.

Glassed Silver:mac

Aham...... From Steve Jobs himself, no mistake quoting, he states for tablets if you need a stylus you've already failed.

 

[apolloa]

Apple should have made a stylus years ago.... They used be the brand of choice by photographers and artists, not people feeling trendy. But at least they got there in the end and it will be interesting to see how good the IOS apps are for pros.

 

[AleXXXa]

The pencil should be included with the iPad pro. 100 bucks for a stylus is outrages. The replacement pen for the surface isn't even that much.

Yeap, a Microsoft pen is about $20 IIRC, but i bought some 3rd party ones for 4 or 5 dollars. And they work perfectly.

 

[frifra]

Aham...... From Steve Jobs himself, no mistake quoting, he states for tablets if you need a stylus you've already failed.

Watch the whole video. He is not saying that you should never use a stylus on a tablet ever at all. Just that it is not a device which should run a system which is designed to be operated with a cursor/stylus.

 

[skottichan]

Yeap, a Microsoft pen is about $20 IIRC, but i bought some 3rd party ones for 4 or 5 dollars. And they work perfectly.

And a passive pen for a Wacom Cintiq is $80.

The 3rd party ones that are $4-5 can't do even remotely what the Apple Pencil does.

 

[Lennholm]

I agree that the "no stylus" quote has been used in the wrong context. He was talking about phones that need a stylus as an input device to navigate around. Making one as an option to write/draw/paint on an iPad makes perfect sense and was long over due.

I'm hoping that in the future we'll be able to tether it to the Mac like a Cintiq

That doesn't change the fact that Jobs made the generic statement "If you see a stylus, they blew it" in reference to Microsofts entry into the consumer tablet market or how the Apple fanboys up until a couple of days ago categorically dismissed and arrogantly ridiculed ANY device that used a stylus.
Gotta love how the fanboys now suddenly invent this "context" now that it's suitable. Jobs's original critique of styli, i.e. "You have to take 'em out, you have to put 'em away, you lose 'em, yuck! Nobody wants a stylus", sounds pretty universal to me.

People comparing this to Steve Jobs and his dislike of a stylus are looking at it completely wrong. Steve was against a stylus for use with every simple task on a phone such as typing or opening up an app. When he made those comments touch screen phones were all using a stylus for everything due to their cheap plastic force touch screens. The Apple Pencil is aimed at a specific use of drawing and is in no way meant to replace using a finger as your primary method of input.

You're moving the goal posts, Jobs' points of critique against styli were not specific to phones and he continued to dismiss styli regardless of device and usage.

 

[Makosuke]

Watching the TechCrunch video more closely and thinking about the screen size of the iPad Pro, I'm now tremendously disappointed that Manga Studio isn't likely to ever have an iOS version.

The combination of an extremely shallow surface-to-pixels distance on an iPad screen (which reduces parallax unlike a Cintiq or budget alternatives like Yiynova or Huion), the incredibly low latency (which unless that TechCrunch video is flat-out lying about how it'll actually respond is night-and-day versus my experience with a Surface Pro 3), and the angle sensor, combined with the reasonable price, decent performance, relatively large screen, relatively light weight, and lack of need to be tethered to a computer inherent in the iPad Pro should make it an absolutely fantastic pro-grade drawing tool.

The only thing it's missing is an "eraser" sensor on the back and a hardware button to map to "undo" for rapid-fire try-retry-retry drawing.

I would seriously be telling my artist to get ready to buy a Pencil and an iPad Pro if he could run Manga Studio on it (that's what we mainly work with).

Oh well.

...or how the Apple fanboys up until a couple of days ago categorically dismissed and arrogantly ridiculed ANY device that used a stylus.

I don't know whether I count as a "fanboy" or not, but I for one have taken Jobs' statement to have nothing to do with art styluses since he said it, day one--as would anybody who has used art tablets for drawing at work or play. And I've certainly not belittled styluses on other devices--I very nearly had the artist I work with buy a Surface Pro 3 in lieu of a monitor/tablet, until I tried one at work and was disappointed by the latency of the stylus, and I have acknowledged from the beginning why the stylus on the Galaxy Note is a nice additional feature, even if its dock suffers from a catastrophic design flaw.

 

[Nausicaa]

You might conclude this is the first low latency pen on the market. But the ntrig and wacom surface pens are both excellent. Apple gets credit for adding tilt--it looks like a good product. How is your totally biased article poviding you with more information than the --somewhat biased--video provided by MR?

Dude, I've been an active stylus user for many, many years, and I've tried them all. I simply want some more details how this one performs relative to other competing products, especially from people who have used them. I thought others might want to read it too. Don't overthink it so much. Jesus... some people.

 

[schopaia]

In 5 years I think this is the most obscenely ignorant post I've ever read

95 posts in and nobody has explained why it needs a battery. So how is that "obscenely ignorant".

 

[apolloa]

Watch the whole video. He is not saying that you should never use a stylus on a tablet ever at all. Just that it is not a device which should run a system which is designed to be operated with a cursor/stylus.

If you want to ignore what he is actually saying and apologise for Apple that's entirely up to you

 

[flychild]

Looks like a vape pen - hopefully it can work with O.Pen