So it's been two days since the Apple keynote at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium and I still can't get over the fact that they stood on stage and sold everyone a stylus. A $99 stylus. For the iPad Pro. I had to sit with that for a minute before I even got to the rest of the announcements.
If you weren't watching Tuesday: Apple showed off the iPad Pro (12.9-inch screen, A9X chip, an optional Smart Keyboard cover), the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus with that new 3D Touch pressure-sensing screen and a rose gold finish, and a redone Apple TV with its own App Store and a remote you can talk to. iOS 9 lands next week, September 16th, so that part at least is close and real and not just a keynote promise.
But the Pencil is the thing I keep coming back to. Because Steve Jobs, in the actual 2007 iPhone keynote, mocked styluses outright. Nobody wants to carry one around, lose it, dig it out of a bag, use a stick to point at things when you've got ten fingers already built in — that was basically the pitch, and it worked, it became gospel for the whole touchscreen era. And now here's Apple, eight years and one dead co-founder later, charging a hundred bucks for a stick.
I'm not even mad about it, is the weird part. I had a Palm Pilot in high school with a stylus that lived in a little silo on the side of the case, and I lost that thing constantly, so I get the old argument. But drawing with your finger has always kind of sucked. Fat, imprecise, no pressure sensitivity, and your whole hand rests on the glass and either smears your ink or gets read as a second touch point by the screen. Every illustrator I know who tried sketching on an iPad eventually gave up and bought a Wacom tablet to plug into a real computer instead. If the Pencil actually does what Apple's showing in the demo videos, tilt shading and all, that's a real gap it's filling, not a nostalgia play.
What gets me is that it only works with the iPad Pro. Not the iPad Air, not the Mini, just the $799-and-up 12.9 inch one that doesn't even ship till November. So this isn't really a mass-market accessory yet, it's a bet that professional-ish creative work is worth chasing on a tablet, the same bet Microsoft's been making with the Surface Pro and its own pen for a few years now. Funny how much closer the iPad Pro looks to a Surface than to any iPad that came before it, keyboard cover and all. I don't think Apple would ever say that out loud on stage, but the resemblance is right there.
The Apple TV stuff interests me less honestly, though I did like that they finally put a real App Store on it instead of the same dozen channel apps we've had since 2012. My Apple TV is a third-gen model sitting under a Roku I mostly use anyway because the Roku search is better, so we'll see if this changes anything for me. $149 for 32GB or $199 for 64GB, shipping late October.
None of this fixes the actual thing that bugs me about the iPad line, which is that iOS still doesn't really let you run two apps the way you'd want to on a screen that big. Split View exists now in iOS 9, sure, but it's clunky compared to just having windows. A twelve-inch tablet with a keyboard and a pencil is basically begging to replace a laptop for a lot of people, and the software's the part that's going to decide if that actually happens or if the Pro ends up being a very nice, very expensive drawing pad that occasionally checks email.
Anyway. I ordered nothing yet. I want to see it in a store first, see how the Pencil actually feels in a hand that isn't a keynote presenter's, and it's not shipping for two more months regardless. But I'll admit the stylus-hater in me from a decade ago lost this one.