At least they didn't call it the Apple Sword. Because at the end of the day, the Pencil is still mightier.
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Apple Pencil Offers High Precision and Low Latency, Gains 30 Minutes of Use From 15-Second Charge
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Sacrifying probably seconds of battery life... I'm guessing the stylus has its own processor, maybe a gyroscope and accelerometer...
Well, buy a $5 lightning extension and then your set hey... I just saved you money.
If you want to take a quote out of it's context that's entirely up to you, tooIf you want to ignore what he is actually saying and apologise for Apple that's entirely up to you
.Well it saids that there is sensor in the stylus - any sensing and processing of signal would require electricity.
That's just a silly comparison. To start with, a replacement powered stylus for the Surface 3/Surface Pro 3 lists for $50, not $20. You might be thinking of the less-full-featured pen for the Surface Pro 2.
$5 iPhone styluses are just a stick with a soft capacitive tip. Period. No pressure sensitivity, no angle sensor, no better precision than a small finger. Fine for use with gloves or basic drawing, and probably all a lot of people need or want, but not on the same scale of art tool as an active, pressure-sensitive stylus.
Look up replacement Wacom pens on Amazon. Basic Wacom pen for high-quality pressure sensitive tablet with no angle sensor: $70. High-end Wacom pen with tilt and angle sensor: $100.
Jot Dash Bluetooth stylus for iPad and other platforms, no pressure sensitivity or angle sensor: $50. Jot Touch pressure-sensitive Bluetooth stylus for iPad, still no angle sensor: $100
$100 for what the Apple Pencil does isn't at all out of line. You can pay, right now, $100 for a third-party iPad stylus that doesn't have the angle sensor features, and will pay just as much for a stylus from Wacom with similar features. It's about twice as much as a Surface Pro 3 replacement pen from Microsoft, but that extra gets you an angle sensor and rechargeable battery at the cost of 3 extra buttons.
You haven't thought about it enough. Do more thinking and you'll figure out why they did it I think.
As for the battery drain to charge the pencil battery - once again, think about it. (hint - it's a 20mAh cell or cap in the thing probably, so what is the maximum drain of capacity from the iPad? (how many mAh in the iPad battery 2000 maybe?)
So you suck out 20mAh from a 2000 mAh battery - is that a concern for you?
The article state that "15 seconds of charging gives you half an hour of usage" - does that make you realize that current draw for charging this tiny accessory is insignificant?
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Exactly. Folks have to admit that the philosophy carried over to the iPad. To its detriment, IMO. Even the name, iPAD, says write on me. Everyone is talking about artists and no one basic handwriting and annotation. That seems almost as disingenuous. I'm glad the "Pencil" is here and I hope future non-Pro iPad models support it.
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Plus, transmitting that data to the iPad Pro takes a few electrons as well. It's a symbiotic system, with the pressure sensors in the iPad and the sensors in the
Pencil working in harmony to create the magic.
That's because the pressure sensitivity exists in the pad/screen. The
Pencil is a different animal, and it showed in the film that was in the presentation. Wacom and Microsoft, I'm sure, will have something similar soon.
Give it a year... The relationship between the iPad and the
Pencil needs more on the iPad side than currently exists (making an assumption here) on them. Next upgrade, I suspect that will be resolved.
You could figure it out.
Does the iPad screen have 3D touch yet?
Does the iPad screen have any pressure sensing?
Even if it did have 3D touch on the screen, would it give you many many levels of pressure sensation?
If the stick has to communicate to the iPad the amount of "pressure", how could it do that?
If the stick has a pressure sensor in it, does it need electricity?
If you wanted to make a stick that emulated pressure sensitivity are there other ways to do it? Easier ways? Better ways?
I think it probably has a clock in it and a pressure sensor.
You pair up with Bluetooth and sync the clocks.
When the pen runs, the touchscreen gets position X,Y and the Z is on the data stream at 240Hz from the pressure sensor. iOS puts it all together in real time on the LCD display for you to see.
That alone could do the job - I don't know if that's how they do it, but that's how I would do it.
Gyro and accelerometer would be awesome, but not sure they are absolutely needed.
Time synchronization is a powerful tool enough to do the job.
BUT WAIT.
It senses the angle you hold it at too! So yeah it probably does have position sensors and stuff wow!
I guess if you hold it at an angle you will get a different feel to the line that is drawn.
This thing sounds more amazing the more I look at it!
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I think that the battery is there to drive the sensing electronics and transmit them to the iPad via BT-LE (Bluetooth Low Energy). I put in an earlier post that this could be a capacitor (fast charging time - long life - but relatively fast energy decay over a battery) rather than a battery - or both (that would be cool! - fast storage of electricity for the short term, and a battery for longer term electricity storage).
I am wondering...what are the chances that after a year or so we get iPad Pro Mini-same tech allowing the use of Apple pencil in iPad Air form factor...
Super cap is a good idea, better than just a lipo. Maybe it has cap and battery.
If you are drawing or writing on the ipad and your hand is also resting on the screen the way it does when you write does it not affect the iPad? I.e. does your hand not interfere? I noticed the guy testing the pencil was keeping his hand off the screen all the time he was drawing that eye. If that is the case it is very unnatural.
I am wondering...what are the chances that after a year or so we get iPad Pro Mini-same tech allowing the use of Apple pencil in iPad Air form factor...
Not sure how much processing power on the iPad it needs, not sure if it is truly a Bluetooth device even, but probably it's close to being able to work on other iOS devices. haha.
But the Apple website says it is made for the iPad Pro - specifically....
So why would that be...
Hmmm
Maybe it is using that fitness coprocessor or maybe it needs lots of horsepower and that's why it is iPad Pro only?
I didn't actually pay that much attention to this thing, but the more I look the more I am interested.
Sure enough just like the multiple guys who say "it doesn't need a battery", I am finding that the pencil has more to it than I thought.
I guess that's why it's $100 and not $4.00.
It senses pressure, orientation, and tilt.
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Not sure about that with the current iOS devices. Maybe I am wrong but as far as I get it, Apple Pencil works only with iPad Pro.
The tip of the pen is not capacitive so I'm not sure how it would work on other iOS devices.
I own a Cintiq 13-HD - basically an LCD screen with a surface responsive to a stylus. One annoying aspect of all such Wacom tablets is that you often need to calibrate them. Initiate a cal, tap on the center of the 4 bulls-eyes that sequentially show up in each corner, and then hope that the parallax error in play at the time holds for the rest of your session. Also, the calibration falls apart within about a half inch perimeter bordering the screen making precision drawing in those regions completely frustrating. So annoying and clunky.
Does the pencil need positional calibration? What's the performance like near the edges/corners? Has anybody tested this for e.g. precision writing of things like small font formulae. Can you repeatedly take the pencil away from the screen and come back and touch exactly the same point first time, every time?
Does the pencil need positional calibration? What's the performance like near the edges/corners? Has anybody tested this for e.g. precision writing of things like small font formulae. Can you repeatedly take the pencil away from the screen and come back and touch exactly the same point first time, every time?
They pretty much already do? The Surface Pro 3 comes with an active pen with 256 levels of pressure sensitivity and four buttons, and I believe the screen has a Wacom digitizer built in such that it's fairly accurate. It's fairly similar in both function and how it works to the Apple Pencil, but with no angle sensor. Its main disadvantage is latency, although I suspect that has as much to do with the tablet running Windows as the pen and digitizer hardware.
Wacom's high-end Intuos tablet-monitors, for their part, have fine-grained pressure-sensitivity and can detect 60 levels of tilt in the pen (which I believe is passive in this case, thanks to fancier hardware in the screen at the cost of a little more distance from glass to pixels and an extremely expensive device), so the capabilities are similar to the Apple Pencil. Wacom also sells the Creative Stylus 2, which is a battery-powered, pressure-sensitive Bluetooth stylus with a replaceable battery for iPads for $80. It also lacks tilt sensitivity, but is otherwise in direct competition with the Pencil, and an alternative for those with non-Pro iPads.
Point being not that the Pencil isn't a good product--it seems very nice from the short videos and what it claims to do--just that what it does do isn't globally unique, and the method it uses to do it also isn't unique. What is currently unique is the pro-grade features for a tablet OS (to date, all competing tablet styluses have not had angle sensors), and the tightly integrated combination of tablet computer, stylus, and software that should--theoretically--combine to make it work very smoothly at a very reasonable price (again, to date, the closest parallels would be the Surface Pro 3, which suffers from running Windows, and the Cintiq, which is a monitor, not a tablet computer).