Put a pass-through connector on the keyboard for that scenario. Or put the power connectors on both sides of the iPad. Easy.
And yes, the iPad will be thinner than the pencil, which makes Apple's idea even more awkward.
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Apple Pencil to Ship With Adapter for Charging With Lightning Cable
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Put a pass-through connector on the keyboard for that scenario. Or put the power connectors on both sides of the iPad. Easy.
And yes, the iPad will be thinner than the pencil, which makes Apple's idea even more awkward.
The pencil is thicker than the tablet. How do you stick it to the side? And if they used the keyboard port then people would be complaining about not being able to use the keyboard because the pencil is charging.
Look obviously Apple isn't perfect and gets things wrong but all the knee jerk reactions From as if Apple's engineers are a bunch of dummies that didn't think things through is ridiculous. And my guess is 99.9% of the people complaining about this have no intention of owning the iPad Pro. I'll wait for actual reviews to see if this is a problem for people in real life, or if it's like the Magic Mouse where people freaked out over nothing (there's a reason it's called a wireless mouse people and OS X gives you ample warning when the battery is getting low).
Well gee, I guess you should send a note to Tim Cook letting him know how stupid his engineers are for not coming up with your brilliant simple solution.
It is reasonable to conclude that this is a new development since Apple had not mentioned the availability of an adapter before this point. When the Pencil was first announced and people were poking fun about the way the Pencil is to be charged, that would've been the time to respond with "well there's an included adapter that will allow you to use your cable".
Inductive charging is nice, but has a couple drawbacks that Apple tends not to take:
1) Charging speed
2) Wastes power on the induction, so it hurts battery life on the iPad itself more to charge a stylus this way.
3) Uses space for the induction coils, and tends to require certain shapes to work. Less optimal shapes makes #2 even worse. Note the shape of Samsung's charging station, and the Apple Watch charger. The round design is actually done intentionally.
Apple in general tends to be slightly dubious of wireless charging in general unless they have to do it. In the case of the Watch, inductive was likely picked in order to make things easier when making it water resistant, despite the losses involved. And the losses are why Apple tends to not like wireless charging, from what I've seen of them. They have in the past been determined to be friendly to power bills and avoid bad things like phantom loads.
And as someone who has played with coils enough in EE classes ... hope the coil was built properly and doesn't fail early (it will always fail eventually, coils tend to erode themselves over time). I'm not sure how much I'd trust Apple to get it right when they've had materials problems with MagSafe cables in the past, and a charging coil has similar failure modes.
Except the port itself isn't magnetic. It snaps to the side via magnets, but it is the force of the magnets that causes the spring-loaded pins in the cover to come into contact with the pins. The catch here is to make it work with the pen, the pen now needs to be shaped like the side of the iPad.
Otherwise, perfectly fine. But not really "Apple". IMO.
Apple, the company trying to reduce mechanical parts, adding a mechanical part? The problem I see here is that it complicates all the wiring for the thing, adds something that can fail early, and reduces the space for the battery. This thing is already pretty big as it is, and I'm not sure I'd sacrifice battery life or size to get this mechanism.
That said, if done right, this one would actually be the most Apple-like. But mechanical failure seems to be something Apple has been fighting on many fronts, reducing the moving parts where they can get away with it. So even then, they probably wouldn't go for this.
Honestly, a simple, non-mechanical adapter is less prone to failure than anything mechanical (assuming no manufacturing defect). It'd be neat if it was something a little cleaner, but on the balance, I'm not actually annoyed by this approach. I don't have to carry spare batteries (SP3), or replace it when the battery dies (SP4), or be near a charger when it dies (Apex Fine Point, 53 Pencil, etc, etc). Odds are I'll charge it when I'm at my desk with the adapter shown in the original post, but if I forget, I won't be out of power in the field. That charge cable won't come with me 90+% of the time.
Actually, they kinda did, just not very loudly:
Ars Technica said:
I dunno if I would have mentioned it in a PR release or anything though. Tempering expectations is all well and good, but I'm really not sure what coming out with that information would have done. The "what is in the box" will be available when pre-orders start, and that information will get folks on the fence about this thing to either order or not if it happened to be a problem. I'm honestly wondering if this is one of those cases where trying to correct some wrong impressions is a total waste of breath. Plus it lets you lose control of your messaging during important advertising windows.
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It actually makes a lot of sense to me...
Plug into iPad, get up for coffee, come back to your desk and it's ready to go for another few hours. Much more elegant than having a separate charger.
I really don't see the problem unless people were expecting to carry the iPad with the pencil sticking out.
It's designed the way it is, so if you run out of charge while you are out with your iPad Pro, you can stick it in and charge it for a minute to get an extra 15 mins of usage. It's a good idea.
I might be different than most, but when I'm traveling, I have at least one charger (iPad) with me and two lightning cables (for iPhone and iPad), so my inclination would be to just charge the Pencil at night. I get the benefit of the quick charge in the iPad, but they could have made an adapter for doing that too, if we're going to have to carry an adapter around anyway.
so will Apple be selling extra Apple Pencil caps (wait a minute...don't pens have caps and pencils have erasers...nevermind) in the store/online for those who will lose the originals?
I think folks might be thinking of two different versions of traveling:
1) Traveling some distance (i.e. town to town).
2) Traveling a short distance, but long enough that having to deal with a forgotten item is a pain (i.e. home to work)
Yes, I always carry chargers with me in the case of #1. But I'd hate to be dealing with #2 to find out I have a laundry list I need to carry with me to make sure I can charge while at a cafe, a meeting, or really anything else day to day.
Normally I'd agree with you and it peeves me to see inventions dismissed by people who have only given the matter ten seconds of thought as opposed to the years of thought given by the designers.
But in this case (and the case of the Magic Mouse) I'm at a loss. They aren't dummies, and I'm not saying I'm smarter then they are but this is just awful. I thought that the instant I saw it, and I've given it a lot of thought since. That's because I really want one of these things, but I can't allow myself to spend that kind of money (a) playing Tim Cook's Annoying Storage Game, and (b) having something so badly designed it insults my intelligence.
My only theory is that there's some ill-functioning management at work. Possibly Sir Jony's obsession with making every device as thin and featureless as an OSX update, is being allowed to trump utility and user experience, since there seems to be nobody with a strong enough opinion to keep matters in balance. That's pure theory, but it allows everyone to be talented/smart/inspired while still collectively making terrible mistakes.
I think they wanted you to be free of cables. So when you had the iPad Pro you could use the iPad Pro and the Pencil separately away from power sources. Then when you needed to charge the Pencil you plug it in to your iPad Pro. I agree that it sticking out is an odd design choice. 15s charge gives 30min of use so it's not terribly bad, but sticks out like an antenna, lol.
I see why they gave the pencil a male port, but instead of an adapter they should have included an lightning extension cable, would have been the better option.
LOL, yay, but people don't learn.
While I don't really see the problem, as we charge phones, ipads, note books, watches, I do have to say that any small device coming with an extra piece that can be lost is badly designed.
Slide it in, flip to the side, reverse it, press it in whatever.
Just not an extra small piece .
It is only a matter of time when that thing is gone.
I have 2 cats and they seem to watch what is going on on my desk. The second I leave
they get whatever is small to play with it. It's on the floor and under some furniture
by the time I get back. And that is IF I even see them doing it and despite shushing and yelling at them.
Indeed, designing the pen to fit its tablet in a combo charging / storage slot would've made perfect sense.
This is what I thought too. It works for the 'Magic' peripherals. In fact, you could just 'borrow' one of those cables rather than relying on a single Lightning Port. Pencil 2, perhaps?
Apple has a lot of poorly thought out "solutions" lately from the lack of 4K on the new AppleTV (while the new iPhone has it but can't display it at that resolution") to removing RAID controls from the new Disk Utility to including 5400 RPM rotational drives in the brand new 4K iMacs by default (why put top of the line CPUs into computer refreshes every year only to bottleneck the system with hard drive technology from 2003?) to moving everything to "pretty" 4K and 5K but not having enough GPU to get out of the way of even the basic operating system without Metal? These are all very POOR decisions and frankly if Tim Cook wasn't so busy splitting stocks and raising prices to eek out every possible last cent out of users, maybe he would have noticed the hardware lines other than the iPhone are going to hell (and even the iPhone is slipping compared to competitors). Put the products FIRST and the rest will follow. Let everything go to hell and your user base will slowly but surely start eroding. Windows 10 isn't Vista. I'm not going to stand by OS X forever "just because" like a fanboy would. Apple was ahead of everyone in 2008. Now they're falling behind everyone else. It's truly heading in the wrong direction.
I think charging the pencil by plugging it into your iPad is a fantastic idea - remember this is not an iPhone, it won't need to be plugged in for more than 10 minutes to get multiple days worth of charge from it. Who wants to have yet another cable? This was blown way out of proportion.
Obviously it wasn't blown out of proportion if Apple ended up adding an adapter to the package.
Well at least someone at Apple has some common sense! This is a half way decent solution, at least you have the option to use the cable or the iPad port with this. Also Apple get a tiny bonus for including the adapter with the pen instead of the usual Apple trait of selling it as a separate accessory.
Uh, Apple is selling more Macs and Iphones than ever. Nobody except a few techhead cares about 4k, and the ATV is kicking everyone else's ass anyway.
Apple's only weakness is the tablet market, where the iPad is getting crushed by ultra-cheap tablets like the Amazon Fire. Which is fine, because Apple doesn't compete at that level.
Nobody in real life cares about specs, unless you're whipping out your dick and showing your other tech friends how big it is. What most consumers care about is "does it do what I want?" And the answer to that shows up on Apple's bottom line.
Oh, that's why they include the adapter for free with every Apple Pencil – to make more money. But now their other perfidious plan of purposefully creating broken iPad Pros will fail. It's hard to be an evil company.
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It's like any drug dealer
why give you the first hit for free, cause you'll be addicted and keep coming back for more.
Give you a free adapter that overcomes an obvious design failure, that you will learn to rely on.
keep coming back to buy new ones when you inevitably lose it and need one to get back to the way things should be
I appreciate having two methods for charging the pen. There are many times when my iPhone battery was running low but didn't have a lightning cable or wall outlet. This wont be an issue for the pen; it can charge briefly using the iPad OR iPhone.
Like many things with Apple, you don't realize how useful something is till you use it.
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