So I finally watched the replay of Wednesday's Apple keynote (I was traveling and only caught the liveblog in real time, which is a miserable way to experience a product event, all those "..." and "NEW SLIDE: pricing" updates with zero context). Four days later and the thing I keep coming back to isn't the iPhone 6s, even though the 3D Touch stuff looks genuinely useful and not just a gimmick for once. It's the Pencil.
You know the one. $99, works with the new iPad Pro (which starts at $799 for the base 32GB model, before you add the $169 Smart Keyboard, so budget accordingly), pressure sensitive, tilt sensitive, no palm rejection weirdness apparently. Fine. Good, even. But "Pencil" is not a name Apple invented on Wednesday. FiftyThree has been selling a stylus called Pencil since late 2014, built specifically to go with their Paper app, which a lot of designers I know already use and like. Same category, same name, same rough idea (draw and sketch naturally on a tablet), and as far as I can tell nobody at Apple felt the need to call it something else. I don't know what's happening behind the scenes with that, whether there's some agreement I'm not aware of or whether FiftyThree is just going to eat it, but it's a weirdly sloppy collision for a company that usually agonizes over naming to the point of absurdity.
And then there's the bigger irony, which every tech writer on Twitter beat to death by Thursday morning but I still think is worth sitting with for a second: this is the same company whose co-founder stood on a stage in January 2007 and said, roughly, if you see a stylus, they blew it. That line got quoted approximately eleven thousand times this week, usually with a screenshot of the Pencil pricing page right underneath it, and I get why, it's an easy dunk. But I don't actually think it's hypocrisy so much as it is Apple finally admitting that a stylus is a real tool for a specific job (drawing, precise editing, note-taking) rather than a crutch for a touchscreen that doesn't work well with fingers. Those are different problems. The 2007 iPhone genuinely didn't need a stylus. A 12.9 inch drawing surface aimed at illustrators and architects is a different animal.
I say this as someone who owned a Wacom Bamboo tablet in college that I used for exactly one Photoshop class and then let collect dust in a drawer for four years, so take my opinion on styluses with a grain of salt. Mine was clunky and laggy and connected by USB to a laptop that weighed as much as a cinder block. If the Pencil is even half as responsive as Apple's demo made it look, it's a real generational jump from that, not an incremental one. I'm just annoyed I don't have a reason to own one, since I don't draw and my handwriting has gotten legitimately worse over the past few years from typing everything (I tried to write a birthday card last month and it looked like a doctor's prescription, not exaggerating).
The other thing nobody's really talking about: the new Apple TV got almost no airtime in the wall to wall 6s coverage, and I think that's the more interesting announcement long term. $149 for 32GB, $199 for 64GB, an actual App Store, Siri built into the remote. Apple TV has been the neglected middle child of the product lineup for years, basically an afterthought box that streamed Netflix and not much else, and this is the first time it looks like they're taking it seriously as a platform instead of a hobby, which is literally the word Steve Jobs used to describe it for like a decade. Whether developers actually build good stuff for a device sitting six feet from the couch, controlled by a tiny remote instead of a keyboard, is a completely separate question, and I'm skeptical honestly. Text input with a d-pad has never once in the history of consumer electronics been good.
Pre-orders for the phones opened yesterday morning. I did not buy one. My 6 is fine. But I did spend an unreasonable amount of time this week reading about a stylus I have no use for, which is probably the most on-brand thing I've done all month.