Apple Pencil Trickery

Apple magic, with a few fatal flaws.

I'm actually not that impressed at the Apple Pencil (specifically the current gen), especially the second gen one. It's actually got a lot of problems and seemingly nobody talks about it. Namely, it's got problems with tracking. It's responsiveness comes from a prediction algorithm which just makes the tablet input quite bad.

Before I delve into the Apple Pencil analysis, please don't take this article as me talking about how bad the Apple Pencils are. They're great pens actually... if you don't start testing it like I do. The stuff I do are probably things nobody would actually do in a real world situation. If you are happy with your Apple Pencil, keep being happy with it. :)

Now, here's some of the analysis.

Whack the pen at an angle at the screen, then you'll see some weird pressure artifacts and some massive problems with how Apple predicts your pen input. I can't seem to embed a video here, so just bear with the image.

I wouldn't say it's a massive issue. To be fair, who's gonna be whacking their screen with their pencil? Nobody... except a very small amount of people. (and me of course)

Is this even relevant then? Yes. It's reflective of the amount of processing Apple is doing. It's trying to make a better experience, yes, but the execution can definitely be improved. Interestingly, this doesn't happen on the first gen Apple pencil, which didn't have the hover feature. If there is something I can deduce from it, it's likely something with that. I don't have a way of testing it to verify it though.

One other thing that I think could be contributing to this is the hover drawing that happens at very low hover distances. Think of it as a pseudo IAF where the pen doesn't need any pressure applied to draw. It's a great feature, don't get me wrong, but I would likely say it has some kind of contributing factor to the wider problem here.

Of course, there's always the upsides to the downsides. It's just a great pencil to use for general note taking and drawing with Procreate and Adobe Fresco. Otherwise, it's a bit wonky time to time I'd say. The tracking just isn't on par with even the cheapest EMR tablets. It's a shame really, but that's what you get with a different technology.

Did I achieve much with this article? No, especially where I told you that the Apple Pencil is still good, regardless of all these flaws. Sometimes, flaws aren't always the way you would expect, here being pretty much fully irrelevant. Personally, I like a raw input, something that is actually reflective of what is really going on, not something that's been processed to all hell like with this Apple Pencil. However, that's not an indicator of real performance, and it's totally fine to have a lot of processing. That's Apple's trickery, and honestly, it's not even that bad. It makes a meaningful improvement to the experience, and the vast, vast majority of people won't notice the flaws.

So, to wrap it all up, I think Apple can improve a lot on their next generation Apple Pencil.