“According to The Korea Herald, Apple is working on a brand-new iPhone that has support for a digital pen. The new phone, the publication says, could start shipping to customers as soon as 2019 — or about two iPhone generations from now,” Ashraf Eassa writes for The Motley Fool. “While this news is neat, the most interesting tidbit came near the end of the report. One of the sources said that Apple will need to significantly improve the performance of its mobile processor technology to support a digital pen. The source also added that Apple ‘had to compromise on some touch performance of the latest iPhone X largely due to the less advanced chipset.'”
“Since the Apple A10X successfully powers the iPad Pro can clearly handle pen input at an extremely fast rate, we know that A10X-level performance is good enough to handle high-speed touch input,” Eassa writes. “Here’s what I think the source cited is really talking about.”
“Apple reportedly tested a high-refresh rate display on the iPhone X (Apple calls such displays ProMotion displays) but ultimately chose not to ship the device with such a display. Instead, the iPhone X shipped with a display that could only refresh its contents at 60Hz — half that of the current iPad Pros,” Eassa writes. “Since a faster refresh rate would dramatically improve the smoothness of the user experience, and since a faster display refresh rate would require that touch input be faster to keep up, I think this is [the issue to which The Korea Herald‘s source is referring.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Bring it on!
As we wrote last week: Of course, this is very much in the rumor realm, but times have changed much since Steve Jobs eschewed the stylus for iPhone.
The iPhone had only a 3.5-inch display when Jobs made those remarks. iPhone 6s/7/8 Plus units have a 5.5-inch display. iPhone X has a 5.8-inch display.
When trying to markup a screenshot or jotting down notes on an iPhone, for example, a finger barely works and never works well. Even rudimentary third-party iPhone styluses work far better for such purposes. Apple Pencil support in these cases would allow for an even better user experience.
SEE ALSO:
Apple considering bringing Apple Pencil support to iPhone – October 13, 2017
The iPhone is a one-handed phone.
The iPhone Plus is not. As such, it does make (slightly) more sense to enable a stylus to work with it.
Styli/styluses suck. Period.
I’ve never seen a website have so many issues with ads or malware or whatever hijacking and redirecting. Happens often on iOS app, it’s happening now on the website in Safari. It makes reading articles here almost impossible – shame as it’s about my favorite Mac-related site…
Whomever you use as an ad server sucks and needs to be canned….
On my Mac, I have over 1.8 GB of free memory until I launch Safari and still over 1 GB with several tabs open until I open MDN. It then falls rapidly to below 400 MB, and sometimes crashes Safari.
On my iPhone, having MDN open perhaps 10% of the time has been consuming about 42% of my battery usage.
Use Ghostery! Cuts down enormously on dopey advertisements.
Also available for newer iPhones.
I would rather not have a pen because when I had my Samsung Note series phone, I never used it. But I’m sure this is not the norm.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said this…TURN OFF JAVASCRIPT!
Javascript is the cause of most security issues out there AND all of the annoying ads
The option to use an Apple pencil makes sense for all iOS devices with large displays – certainly the iPhone 8 plus and above and, perhaps, the iPhone 8, as well.
Oh joy. Another addon for iPhone users to shell out huge amounts of money for.
Devin Prater Assistive Technology instructor in training, JAWS Sertified.
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