“Your standard No. 2 pencil is made of wood, graphite, a little metal and bit of synthetic rubber. You can buy a whole box of them for a few dollars,” Bill Detwiler reports for CNET. “The Apple Pencil costs $99, and for that price, it better be filled with pixie dust and unicorns. I decided to crack it open and find out.”
MacDailyNews Take: Ooh, 99 bucks for a precision marking implement that’s simply best of its kind. Unmatched. If $99 for Apple Pencil is too much for you, you can’t afford an iPad Pro to begin with.
“Released alongside the iPad Pro, the Apple Pencil let’s you draw, take notes, mark up documents, annotate photos and do basically anything you can do with a traditional pencil,” Detwiler reports. “It’s also an excellent precision input device for the iPad Pro, and makes it easy to select small menu items or finely adjust app controls.”
“So, what did I learn from cracking open the Apple Pencil? Well for starters, this thing is NOT meant to be taken apart,” Detwiler reports. “As for the brains of the Pencil, there’s an 32-bit RISC ARM-based Cortex-M3 MCU from ST Micro, a Bluetooth chip from Cambridge Silicon Radio (which is now part of Qualcomm), and at least five other chips with unknown functions. Powering all this is a tiny 3.82 V, 0.329 Wh lithium-ion battery. There’s also the antenna and pressure and angle sensors near the tip.”
Read more and check out all of the teardown photos in the full article here.
SEE ALSO:
PC Magazine reviews Apple Pencil: Must-have device, your iPad Pro’s go-to companion – Editors’ Choice – November 24, 2015
The Pen Addict reviews Apple Pencil: Astounding, thoroughly impressive – November 23, 2015
Jony Ive: Apple Pencil is for making marks, the finger is the interface for iOS – November 18, 2015
New Apple Pencil stock begins arriving at some U.S. Apple Retail Stores – November 17, 2015
Neat device. Would be useful to use with regular iPads. Not sure how long it would take Apple to add that capability, but earliest would likely be fall of 2016.
A pencil in the lead without the lead.
So as to being just another stylus, no way. Once again Apple shows everyone else how to push the the tech and improve on existing products.
“..to begin with.” Really MDN? I believe you meant “..in the first place.”
The Apple Pencil comes in as a lower priced quality writing implement, a decent quality fountain pen from Mont Blanc or Waterman will set you back $300, at least.
“Well for starters, this thing is NOT meant to be taken apart. Which is a real shame, because other styluses, like the Pencil from FiftyThree can be disassembled.”
Real shame?? they didn’t make the Pencil to be disassembled. And you won’t want users to be messing around with the organs.
“That brings me to my second observation. If the Pencil wasn’t designed to be repaired, why use screws (six of them) inside it?”
You use screws for ease of assembly as well….
Why waste another pencil in a tear down ? That’s already been done by iFixit and others and hi-res photos of all the components are available.