Several of the salespeople at the Brandon, Florida Apple Store said that they had TWO Pencils available for sale when the store opened yesterday. They sold instantly.
Apparently most of the people who were able to purchase a Pencil yesterday are too busy sketching/drawing on their IPPs to actually type a message here...
I successfully pre-ordered (3am Eastern) one 128gb IPP, smart keyboard, and pencil for in store pickup at an Apple Store in the Washington DC area. Picked up everything at about 10:30am. The smart keyboard and pencil I received were in plain white boxes and had stickers that read "DEMO ONLY - NOT FOR RESALE." I asked about this and the guy said there was some stock mixup and sold them to me anyways. About 1:30pm I get a call from the store manager - she wants the accessories back. She said there were only two sets available and they were not meant for sale. She offered a refund plus a pretty significant discount off the iPad Pro if I were to return the items within a day or two. I returned them to the store yesterday...
...and then I realized how just about no one in America had them yet. Doh, Face palm.
Some thoughts:
The pencil was fun to use but I didn't discover that I had a need for it. I am no artist and so my awful drawings in Notes were still awful. I couldn't figure out how to change the line thickness. It doesn't do handwriting recognition. It does, however, recognize written my stoopid Chinese School Calligraphy. There is no charge indicator so I basically counted out 15 seconds (that's what the ad materials say) and trusted it would work for awhile. It never died on me, so whatever. The grip was nice, though it would be difficult to use the pencil with sweaty or greasy paws. The weighted roll was, cute.
The keyboard was meh. It's fine on a desk but it makes the ipad Pro feel unbalanced when you use it on your lap when sitting, or on your chest when laying down. The keys have a good press (no click or crunch), and I think I could type out a report on it. The thing that bothered me the most was how clumsy it was to flip out the keyboard from the cover and then to set up the triangle support. I didn't get a lot of time to figure out what the deal was, but it just felt like there was one magnet too many. The cover doesn't close flat either. Because the keyboard only takes up one part of the cover, there is a dip where the keyboard isn't. The asymmetry kills me (IMHO it's as bad as the Nissan Cube).
So now that I don't have the accessories, I don't really miss not having the pencil. Maybe down the road I'll figure out some need for it, and I'm sure the price will be the same. I ordered the keyboard again, and while I'm waiting for that, I decided to try out the
Logitech CREATE (which apparently is in stock at the local Apple Store for $20 less than the Apple). I'll get it later today.
