Apple’s legendary attention to detail comes into full view yet again with the iPad Pro’s optional accessory, the Apple Pencil. As first discovered and shared by The Verge in its iPad Pro review, the Apple-branded stylus—which was designed exclusively for the new iPad—is weighted so it won’t roll away on a table top. In fact, it always stops rolling with the word ‘Pencil’ facing upward on its metal band, which is awesome.
Apple Pencil innovation
Noting that the Pencil is just “plain fun”, The Verge’s Lauren Goode goes on to detail its Apple white appearance and a capped Lightning connector for charging the Pencil via the iPad Pro’s Lightning port.
“There are Apple-y things about it — for example, the fact that it is weighted, and won’t roll away on a table top, and always stops rolling with the word “Pencil” facing upward on its metal band (seriously, I’ve tried this at least a dozen times),” she wrote.
The Apple Pencil lacks a clip and isn’t magnetized, unlike Microsoft’s Surface stylus. In terms of crucial features like precision, tracking speed and palm rejection, the consensus out there is that it leaves all of the other styli in the dust.
“In my experience there was almost no latency between the Pencil and the screen,” says the author. “It really felt like I was using a pencil or pen.”
“I pressed and dragged my palm along the iPad Pro’s display while using four different apps — Apple Notes, Adobe Sketch, FiftyThree Paper, and Notability — and I couldn’t leave a palm mark no matter how hard I tried,” she continued.
“I was also able to switch between using my finger and using the stylus without any lags,” reads the review.
The Apple Pencil is an optional $99 purchase.
iPad Pro innovation
As for the iPad Pro, the biggest innovation is its in-house designed ‘A9X’ system-on-a-chip that delivers notebook-class speeds, managing to outperform the 12-inch Retina MacBook’s 1.2 GHz Intel Core M dual-core processor.
Despite the faster chip and a much bigger screen with significantly more pixels, the iPad Pro falls roughly in line with prior iPads in terms of battery life.
An iFixit teardown analysis has discovered that the ten-hour battery life is achieved in spite of the iPad Pro’s innovative four-speaker audio design that occupies precious space that could have otherwise been used for a 50 percent bigger battery, as shown on the image below.
The iPad Pro includes a 3.77 V, 10,307 mAh battery and ships with a much longer Lightning cord than usual, ArsTechnica noted in its ultimate review of the gizmo.
For those wondering, it takes around four and a half hours to completely recharge the iPad Pro’s battery using Apple’s included 12W USB Power Adapter, assuming the device is not used during charging.
Source: The Verge