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Apple Pencil
- Thread starter liam.berlin
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A shame. I would love to sketch on it with my iPhone 6S Plus!
I am so fed up of it being called a stylus and the Steve Jobs quotes being used and used.
It is a stylus...there's not really any getting around that. The thing is a 5+ year old piece of tech with an apple logo. It warrants a $29 price tag; which is my estimate of what it will be on the used market very, very soon - but that's only assuming it's widely adopted, which I believe it might be mediocrely adopted out of interest at first; and then just about as much as the apple remote following that. I find it likely that Jobs already knew this. It's not that they're not useful; it's just that given the product line at the time, and the general nature of professional applications (and already seen in the heavy limitations of the iPad pro), it was not worth Apple's time to re-create something that already exists in far better form.
I would more use the term digital pencil. It can do things a finger cannot do and it is not essential for operation of the device. And is this the first over-priced Apple item that has been seen from other companies?
Works with the iPad Pro only. A shame. I'd love one for my iPad 3!
But it's a stylus. Don't let marketing get to you that much.
I would love one for my iPhone 6S Plus!
Hmmm... one that is not needed and can draw in better detail than a finger. I think it is getting a very hard time.
It looks beautiful and I bet the packaging will be so cool.
That's all a stylus is. They're weren't necessary on pocket PC's, Nintendo consoles, touch computers, etc, either. It was an optional method to get more precision than a finger is all.
Its a stylus
Just look at the Surface Pro 3, it has the exact same device, though Apple's incarnation is nice because its rechargeable where as the MS Stylus uses s single AAA battery. The thing I like about the SP3 stylus is the multiple buttons, I wish Apple included that for increased functionality.
As for the original question, its only compatible with the iPad Pro, I think that has a digitizer that is sensitive to handle that stylus. All other Styli for the iPads (and iPhones) are like a blunt instrument - very poor for doing finesse and precise work
Well that's good news - I was beginning to worry that it might be an actual pencil and we'd all be busy cleaning black marks of our iPad screens. Still, if the tip wore out you could just use a sharpener...
Seriously, there are lots of types of stylus, and the cheaper ones are just variations on sticks of conductive plastic (you can pay $29 for a fancy one of those if you try). They're really not that good. The styli for Samsung Note tablets (and the MS Surface, I think?) use Wacom graphics pad technology and contain active electronics and pressure sensors that communicate inductively (& draw power from) an grid behind the tablet screen - there's a night & day difference from the 'plastic finger' styli. The newer, better iPad styli, e.g. Adobe Ink, or 'Pencil by 53' are powered and contain pressure sensors that communicate with the tablet by Bluetooth - the "Apple Pencil" sounds like it fits into that category, at the same ball-park price.
Well, there are already pages of styli on Amazon - including the more expensive offerings from Adobe, 53 etc. so there must be some market there. The big change with the Apple pencil is not that the technology is new, but that support will be built into iOS.
Jobs first made his comments about styluses in 2007 at the iPhone launch. Did you ever use a pre-iPhone smartphone running Windows Mobile? They had these cruddy resistive touch screens and came with silly little toothpick styli that you needed because the on-screen buttons were too small to push with a finger. Pretty sure that was what Jobs was thinking about.
Ditto pre-iPad tablets: they ran regular windows and you needed a stylus to operate any software that hadn't been designed with big friendly buttons for touchscreen use.
This is entirely different - iOS is completely usable via touch, you don't need a stylus to operate fiddly controls. Styli are there for handwriting, art and annotation tasks where the precision of a pen and extra dimensions of input are important. There are already successful stylus-enabled apps and 3rd-party styli. There are already drawing/painting apps from the likes of Adobe and Pixelmator.
I'd see the stylus as critical to the success of the iPad pro: the Pro will fail unless people want to start using it for content creation rather than consumption (the jury is back and the 5" phablet is the consumption device of choice) and for that you will, on occasion, need an input device with more precision than finger-painting, otherwise you'll go back to a laptop & mouse.
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The digitizer needs to be more precise - the iPads are made for fingers, thus the styli being offered for them are blunt instruments. Like the Surface and Surface Pro, the iPad Pro is designed for the stylus.
Its a stylus
Just look at the Surface Pro 3, it has the exact same device, though Apple's incarnation is nice because its rechargeable where as the MS Stylus uses s single AAA battery. The thing I like about the SP3 stylus is the multiple buttons, I wish Apple included that for increased functionality.
Wacom's doesn't need a charger nor battery – gets powered from the surface itself. That, is still something that the competition hasn't managed to catch up.