Myke Hurley, writing as a guest for Pen Addict, explores the design of the Apple Pencil in great detail.
A few highlights:
With the weights inside the Pencil, as soon as you set it down, it rolls a little and then stops itself. The weights appear to have been designed to balance it and take over. In most instances this works out great, but I have observed that if you place the Pencil down with any force, say if it is not gently put down on a desk, but maybe dropped from a few inches (I love my implements, but I use them too…), the Pencil will likely roll a couple of times in the process.
When this happens the weights actually seem to give it momentum, and will propel it forward further and faster than it would have otherwise. Each time as the Pencil turns, it acts against itself as it is moving to quickly to balance, and on it goes, off the table.
And:
Because of a combination of Bluetooth and the fact that Apple designed the Pencil and the iPad Pro to work in conjunction with each other, the iPad Pro is able to accurately distinguish the difference between the Pencil tip and any touch input.
I have been astounded by just how well this works. I can have my arm, wrist, and other hand on the screen, and the iPad Pro can distinguish the movement of the Pencil over the movement of anything else. I am thoroughly impressed by this.
I’d love to read about the actual engineering behind palm rejection.
Fascinating review. Don’t miss the samples of Myke’s handwriting. Amazing how precisely the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil allow you to mirror your natural handwriting. I wonder if apps will emerge built around this capability.
It’s interesting how everyone assumes Apple has ‘paid massive attention to details’ and put weights in their Pencil. iFixit shows us it’s just parts. They may have been arranged to make the Pencil roll and stop with the “Pencil” label up, but it’s still just parts, and from the looks of it it would be kinda hard to arrange them so the Pencil were perfectly balanced and kept rolling.
What do you mean by “parts”? Aren’t weights also “parts”. Whatever it is I don’t think it’s by accident.
All of this and they didn’t think to include an eraser.
Honestly, I find it easier selecting an eraser in software. Versus flipping over the pencil.
But I doubt they “didn’t think” about it. Clearly, they thought it was more important to put a lightning adapter on the other end.
I’m sure every single designer and artist at Apple has used every other digital pen out there, and isn’t oblivious to the hardware erasers.
Have you used tablets much? (truly asking, not trolling you, comments sections are so hard to navigate). I’ve been using them for years and as a result I can flip a stylus in my hand and back again in a fraction of a second. This is is many times faster than finding the erase tool in the palette, clicking it, erasing the content, finding the brush or writing tool I was using in the palette and click it again to change back.
I imagine the target audience for the iPad Pro and Pencil are people like me with a great deal of tablet and stylus experience. I think you’ll find most, if not all, of them are put off by the lack of an eraser.
Could Apple perhaps design a cap for the lighting port the includes the eraser?
I like the eraser on the end of my FiftyThree Pencil. It’s good for quick adjustments but I think you make a good point, I do use it less than other methods. Thinking about it I remove things in Paper drawings in this order of usage:
nonsense. they surely consider putting an eraser on the top. but as illustrators can tell you, most high end pencils dont do this — because its better to have a dedicated eraser. which is why in the Pencil apple decided to have you use an eraser tool in your app.
theyre smarter than you are. once people get that, theyll be less disappointed with, oh, everything.
That was good. Better still would have been “Apple never makes mistakes so they see no need for an eraser.”
I think a key point is that the Pencil is being detected by a separate system than the hand is being detected by, so it is not the traditional palm rejection where the device is guessing what is hand and what is stylus. The iPad Pro knows what is hand and what is Pencil. The Pencil is linked to the iPad by Bluetooth so that iPad knows exactly where the Pencil is at all times, and so it knows also where your hand is at all times.
What really bugs me is how people give Apple credit for creating products, when the 3rd law of thermodynamics clearly states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, and we know that energy is just matter times the speed of light squared, and Apple’s products are made out of matter, so clearly, Apple does not actually create anything.
Personally, I think it’s more about taking away than it is to undo.
I rarely erase whole marks, but I do erase parts of marks around edges or just to reveal paper though the ink or paint. For this I find flipping the stylus over to be quicker and Undo doesn’t factor in.
Maybe that’s just me though.
I think the reviewer gave too much Credit to the apple pencil. I found it very surprising that he praised the weight distribution of the apple pencil, even the cheapest pens offer better weight distribution than Apple pencil, which is infamously and uncomfortably top heavy. Apple pencil ts the best stylus ever made That successfully mimics the pressure dynamic of the natural media. But in every other aspect it lags behind Surface Pen. Good for Apple pencil that pressure dynamics happens to be the most important thing in a stylus. . And with it’s 0 gram weight Initial activation force, Apple has got the most important factor right. But Apple will continue to deprive pencil users of ultimate penmanship if it refuses to emulate ergonomics of real fountain or ballpoint pens. A Good start will be releasing an Apple pen a different product than Pencil that is inspired by Surface pen.
They thought about it but it would have interfered with their charging port. Moreover, pencil is designed more for drawing as compared to handwriting/calligraphy, hand writers prefer eraser, artists prefer undo. Apple has the ability to mate the best digital handwriting instrument but it refuses to. Because Apple Much like Google, still believe is typing is better than handwriting.