HOW IT WORKS
Apple Pencil: the clever capacitive stylus
The difference between an ordinary pencil and an Apple Pencil is pretty clear. The former is for writing, drawing and shading on paper; the latter, for writing, drawing and shading on iPads. The Apple Pencil may look a lot like a normal pencil but there’s a lot of technology crammed into its compact case. Which is just as well, as it costs quite a bit more than a normal pencil does.
The first-generation Apple Pencil was launched in 2015 and is still on sale; the second-generation launched in late 2018. If you’re buying one, it’s important to know that not all iPads support the first-generation, or any generation. See below to check what works with what. The short version is that if your iPad has a USB-C connector, it only supports the second-generation Pencil.
Although there are important differences between the two generations of Apple Pencil, they work in the same way. The Apple Pencil contains an ultra-low power ARM-based microcontroller with 64MB of flash memory, a 0.329Wh rechargeable lithium-ion battery, a Bluetooth module to connect to your iPad wirelessly and a three-axis accelerometer to detect motion and velocity.
The tip of the pencil is made from a hard capacitive plastic. Capacitive means it conducts electricity, just like your fingers do, which is important: if the tip wasn’t capacitive, your iPad wouldn’t be able to detect the pencil at all. It’s a softer plastic than the rest of the Apple Pencil, so it wears away over time
– albeit over a very long time.
The combination of a capacitive tip and an accelerometer enables the Apple Pencil to identify how you’re holding it and adjust on-screen brushes accordingly, and it delivers accurate location down to the individual pixels on the screen with very low latency – especially on the 120Hz display of the iPad Pro. Latency is the gap between doing something
It’s important to know that not all iPads support the first-gen Apple Pencil
and your device responding, and the less there is the more real your Apple Pencil feels. Last but not least, the Apple Pencil is pressure sensitive too, so if you push the nib down harder you’ll get darker lines in your drawings. Because it and your iPad know not just where the pencil is but in what direction it’s moving and how you’re holding it, it can tell the difference between deliberate finger taps and accidentally brushing the screen with the palm of your hand.
Together these features make the Apple Pencil feel just like a real pencil and draw like one – or like a charcoal stick, or a fine brush, or anything else. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t room for improvement.
The next generation
While the first-generation Apple Pencil has a Lightning connector for charging, the biggest difference between the first- and second-gen versions is that the latter doesn’t have a Lightning connector – so it’s not compatible with iPads with Lightning ports. Instead it charges wirelessly using the magnetic connector built into the third-, fourth- and fifth-generation iPad Pro and the fourthgeneration iPad Air. Taking out the Lightning connector enabled Apple to make the Apple Pencil slightly shorter, and the flat-sided magnetic connector meant that the secondgen Apple Pencil needed a redesigned casing. We think it’s more comfortable than the first, but that was hardly unpleasant either.
The other big change is that the second Apple Pencil contains a touch sensor, which can detect even fairly gentle taps by your fingers. That enables you to create or use programmed gestures to carry out particular tasks, such as switching brushes in a drawing app or moving from writing mode to erase mode in a notes app.
What’s coming next
Many observers thought that Apple would announce a third-generation Apple Pencil at its early 2021 Spring Loaded event, but that proved to be overly optimistic. But a thirdgeneration is in development. Rumour sites have been reading the Apple patent runes, which include a pen that can detect colours like Photoshop’s eyedropper tool; a Touch Bar-style display on the side – which seems unlikely to us – haptic feedback and new gestures for zooming in and out.
The most tantalising patent they uncovered is for a stylus that writes in the air, which sounds a bit far-fetched until you consider Apple and Apple developers’ focus on augmented reality apps that exist in three– dimensional spaces beyond your iPad screen. Apple Pencil Air, anyone? Carrie Marshall