Surely, Lightning must be a smart enough connector technology to internally avert this obvious eventuality.
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Apple Pencil to Ship With Adapter for Charging With Lightning Cable
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Apparently not. There's a dot reportedly on the adapter to instruct the user of the correct orientation so that it will work. If that's true, then Lightning is not smart enough to prevent that from happening.
I really hate buying batteries. Didn't know the surface needed them! What a dissapointment!!
And AAAA??? Wonder how much they cost...
What do you mean "apparently"? Is that simply conjecture? The dot looks like an LED charging light to me.
What could go wrong?
That's one good way to snap a pencil.
Correction. Prejudice would imply that my response was predicated on nothing when in fact, it was based upon your reply that needlessly invoked an insulting word for the female anatomy to describe anyone that complains in this thread.
There have been plenty of good ideas put forward. Frankly, making the thing hollow and letting us charge it by blowing through it would barely be more ridiculous than what they came up with. Even if they added a kazoo noise to go with it.
Amazed Apple didn't do that.
It would be so much safer, easier and less complicated to magnetically snap the pencil to the ipad's side when it needs juice.
No dongles/adapters to lose, no caps to lose and no separate cables. Nothing extra needed at all. Not even a charger.
I'm sure they considered that approach but then that would lock the Apple Pencil to the iPad Pro (unless Apple migrated the magnetic keyboard port to the iPad Air and iPad Mini). I believe that the Apple Pencil will be brought to both Air and Mini in the future and placing the additional requirement of the magnetic port would make that more difficult/costly.
What could go wrong?
It's only meant to be used as a quick charge, 15 seconds gets you 30 minutes for the Apple Pencil. or if you don't want to charge this way you could use the adapter that I'm assuming will come with the Apple Pencil.
It's not my conjecture, it's what's being reported by 9to5. I would hope it's an LED status light. But since the Siri Remote for the TV has no such light to tell you when it's achieved a full charge, I wouldn't hold my breath on this one. 9to5 says it's for proper charging orientation. So I have to assume that's what it is until we learn otherwise.
I really think that adapter was an afterthought. Apple realized it is a terrible way to charge, and the lightning connector could snap off. Apple should have made it a female connector, so the lightning cable could be used to connect to it directly. Now you need to carry an adapter and you could lose it during travel.
I really don't understand why people feel the need to defend Apple's stupid design decisions. You'd think they could just admit (at least to themselves) it's stupid and move on.
Defending a sinking ship by claiming the hole was originally put there with the intent of helping with deck cleaning and won't sink the ship as long as the rubber gasket doesn't pop out or isn't intentionally removed by a person (you know to use it for deck cleaning) doesn't really solve the underlying problem that whatever their intent was, if it has bad consequences it's a BAD DESIGN.
Simply providing a cubby hole that acts as a storage place to put the pencil and charges it (preferably by induction) would have solved both problems (somewhere to keep the stylus) and somewhere to charge it that doesn't have it sticking out and asking it or the connector to be broken should something bump it.
Apple used to be known for awesome designs (see the original Mac Pro which was a wonder for easy access to upgrade it) and lately they seem to be known for doing stupid things that Design 101 would/should have covered.
MagnusVonMagnum - I think you're really overblowing it. The iPad Pro is a monumentally wondrous design, everyone hails Johnny Ive as a genius. Look at the rapturous applause Apple got when Tim Cook showed it.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. I can't see any reason why Apple wouldn't bring the same keyboard to at least the iPad Air considering they originally introduced the iPad with a custom keyboard dock. I also see this new magnetic port being something that is going to get expanded upon by Apple as well as third parties, and will eventually find its way into all iOS products. In any event, they could always implement a lower cost solution for the Pencil at that point, if this truly were a major cost prohibitive consideration, and come up with a better design than they have currently in the process. At a minimum they could offer a magnetic charging dock for the pen for use with the mini and Air. But since the Pencil is likely to eventually find use across all touch screen Apple products including the iPhone 6-sized phones, there's even more reason to add the new magnetic connector technology to all those products, negating the need for any other charging methods.
I can't wait to see someone sitting on a train with their pencil sticking out the sized of the iPad like an erection.
Unification of Lightning port, maybe? So you can charge it with every available lightning accessory. Or do you want to buy and carry around another charger or proprietary cable for pencil only, just to charge it outside an iPad?
Well, THAT would be bad design decision.
Again, I am not defending it per se, I just kind of understand, why they did it that way. The "errection" of the stylus is meant to be an emergency thing, when you pencil is empty, giving you minutes of drawing with just with couple seconds of that boner.
For me and my team is much more important, how it good it works at the end of the day...
oh the pov that if you dont work for apple you cant have good ideas and apple up on their pedestal cant actually have bad ideas. whether commentators in this thread intend to own an ipad pro is not relevant. what is relevant is how silly some of apples ideas.
i cant actually say this is all new because they did of course release the ibook in 2005 with usb ports on the left side while they skimped on the length of the cord on their mouse creating a very unpleasant experience.
you are also confusing that the pencil only needs to be plugged in the port for 15 seconds to achieve a certain amount of recharge compared what might happen in real life. that is one one aspect of a good and well thought out design.