Jony Ive Interview: The Story Of The Apple Pencil

Well, I heard the Surface Pen is pretty good, too…

Ive hopes those using the Pencil for the first time are surprised by this, as “every other stylus you’ve used is a pretty poor representation of the analogue world”. But he still envisages a future when the Pencil will exist very happily next to real paper and an HB pencil.

As much as I hate Apple as a company and will generally not use their products myself (at this time, they seem to be correcting behavior I dislike the most, like offering their services on other devices.. ahem apple pay)...

They do excel in adding that polish to products/technology to make them intuitive and more functional to most people.

I cannot speak for the MS stylus currently but if Apple does make their pencil feel more connected or natural that is a pretty big win in my book. I know it has been ages but I remember stylus' always being "disconnected" more than the analog counterparts like pens/markers etc.

If you could draw with pen and paper, using a stylus would make the same work look like a kindergarten project whether due to lack of physical feedback or more sensitivity dunno.

As I said while I won't use apple products now, they do raise the bar from time to time and eventually improves the products I do use. Competition is great!

The Surface pens are excellent. And make no mistake, the Apple Pencil is a me too thing and goes completely against what Steve Jobs envisioned with tablets.

(Steve Jobs) It's like we said on the iPad, if you see a stylus, they blew it.

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The pencil is so plasticky though for $99 and it's missing eraser and functional button when the Surface Pro pen has all that plus metal metal build for half the price.

I love how it's a "story" as if it's not just a fucking stylus like all the rest. Sure it may be more "refined" (despite it feeling cheap as mi7chy said) but it's still just a damn stylus...and a feature lacking one at that.

Leave it to Apple and it's lackeys to make what they do seem like some big revolutionary thing. And this isn't me hating on Apple, I just get sick of the holier-than-thou type attitudes of it all.

But this is Apple just being Apple. Copy what others are and have been doing and try to make it seem like they came up with it all along.

Didn't you know that Apple has secretly had active stylus for their iPads since they came out? It's just now that it's gotten to the point of refinement that they felt it OK to grace us with it's presence. /s

Hopefully the story ends with them not making it into stores for launch.

I've not personally tried the iPad Pro nor pencil but comparisons to that tech and the Surface Pro 4/Surface Book and pen are mixed from what I've seen online from people that have used both. The Pencil might be a bit better with lag and the tilt function seems to be pretty cool. The new Surface pen has an eraser, much better battery life with replaceable batteries.

For note taking both seem to work about the same though with Windows there's much better handwriting to text and recognition functionality. OneNote desktop for instance allows searching of handwritten notes without need for conversion to text, that's VERY slick for this type of tech. Artists may prefer the Pencil because of the tilt shading and better latency though they won't have all of the tools that Windows does for a while if ever.

I'm very glad that Apple finally recognized the importance of digital ink on tablets and applaud what they have done here. But it's nothing they shouldn't have done a long time ago and it is at best overall probably no better than the best of the rest.

Sooooooooo.....a plastic stylus merits its own backstory? SRSLY?

its suprisingly smooth, used the ipad pro with the procreate app and theres way less lag than the pen on my sammy note pro, and surface 3 tablets. im hoping to try the surface 4 next week and i hope its more fluid like the surface 2 pen which was a let down as it needed recalibrating alot

Videos shot at 120fps show higher responsiveness and less lag with the pencil compared to the Surface stylus. Artists and people I trust have noted that its even more responsive than their Cintiqs. The main downside is that the pencil doesn't have any buttons, and that's a big one in terms of workflow. In terms of accuracy and response I've only seen positive things though.

$5 worth of tech all dressed up as the second coming.

IMO the pen/pencil is the only thing that makes a tablet useful.

Emission said:

IMO the pen/pencil is the only thing that makes a tablet useful.

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You're not alone especially when considering a tablet of this price.

Knight_of_BAAWA said:

Sooooooooo.....a plastic stylus merits its own backstory? SRSLY?

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I'm eagerly anticipating the iPod Sock documentary.

daglesj said:

$5 worth of tech all dressed up as the second coming.

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That sounds like some serious over-pricing on the build-price for that tech.