5 reasons why I think the Apple Pencil Pro is a waste of money for iPad users

Apple has been a pretty consistent manufacturer when it comes to handheld devices over the years. The iPhone is the most popular smartphone in the world. The iPad is the best-selling tablet to ever exist. If you want to count laptops as handheld devices, the MacBook Air or Proare perennially some of the best-selling laptops.

There are plenty of people who won’t give one company autonomy over all of their devices. But there are many who do, and Apple products’ ability to work with one another for a seamless experience is a massive plus, as you can go from working on something on your MacBook to your iPhone without much issue. Over the years, Apple has produced many accessories to work with their devices to enhance them.

You can think of the Magic Keyboard for Macs, AirPods to work with iPhones, and the Apple Pencil to work with iPads. The two most recent versions of the Apple Pencil now are the Apple Pencil USB-C and the Apple Pencil Pro, with the Apple Pencil and Apple Pencil 2 predating them. These styluses have been used to make drawing on your iPad more simple. But I’m here to tell you to save your money and don’t purchase it.

1

It has limited compatibility

Just because I have an older iPad doesn’t mean I should be punished

Look: I get it. It makes sense as a company to make newer products and only make them compatible with your newer devices. This causes people to upgrade the device in order to use the new accessory. It’s not like Apple only made the Apple Pencil Pro compatible with one iPad. But they did limit the use of it to only iPads with at minimum an M2 chip, minus the one iPad mini it works with.

That’s it. Unless you have any of these seven iPads, you can’t use one. If you want to have a better experience with more iPads, the Apple Pencil USB-C is probably a better fit for you, as it works with many more iPads. If you have one of the compatible iPads, this isn’t an issue for you. But if you don’t, that’s an added chunk of money you have to spend in order to use it.

2

It’s incredibly expensive

I’m spending how much on a stylus?

Manufacturing devices isn’t cheap. It costs money to mass-produce things and to get the technology into such small devices. But do I really need to pay $129 for a glorified stylus? Even the first-generation Apple Pencil (which has a ton of other issues compared to the Pencil Pro) is still $99, and it was upgraded in 2018 after debuting in 2015. Apple tends to price their accessories high across the board, as you have to pay nearly $30 for a USB-C charging cable.

But for something as easy to misplace, $129 is a steep pill to swallow. Obviously, the more you lose something, the more you may have to buy. I will give Apple credit for putting tracking abilities in the Apple Pencil Pro, as that was a big negative for previous versions. But the advancements of the Apple Pencil Pro aren’t so much better that I need to spend this much on it.

The cheapest iPad version that it works with costs $499. That’s a minimum of nearly $630 before I even add in a possible case for just the iPad and Apple Pencil Pro.

3

Haptic feedback is overly sensitive

This is both a plus and a minus

People use iPads for all kinds of activities — it’s a versatile tablet that can do a lot, and the Apple Pencil Pro added haptic feedback to help it do more. One of the new tricks with the Apple Pencil Pro is the addition of squeeze-sensitive areas along the sides. When you press them, you’ll feel a subtle haptic “pulse” that confirms the Pencil got the message. It’s neat and opens up new use cases depending on the app you’re working in.

That said, it takes some getting used to. The sensitivity is light enough that you can trigger it by accident just by holding the Pencil naturally, which means you might find the Tool Palette popping up over and over when you don’t want it. It is handy once you train your grip, but compared to the old double-tap feature, it feels less intuitive and a little more finicky.

4

The battery life isn’t stellar

And a completely dead one could be useless

Because of its new features, the Apple Pencil Pro doesn’t have a long-lasting battery life. More tech inside means more drain, so while it can usually stretch three to four days on moderate use, heavy users will find themselves charging more often. A full charge takes about an hour, which isn’t too bad.

If you’re anything like me and forget to charge anything that isn’t your phone, you’ll probably pick it up dead more than once. The good news is you can snap it magnetically to your iPad for charging, which is convenient — unless your iPad itself is dead. And when the Pencil runs out of juice, it’s not just missing features — it flat out doesn’t work. It’s incredibly frustrating, and you may just want to have a non-interactive one without a battery as a backup in case that happens.

5

It has features you really don’t need

I’m not looking to reinvent the wheel

Apple

At the end of the day, I really just want a stylus that helps me sketch ideas for work projects and jot down notes. I’m not a professional illustrator, so I don’t need every new trick packed into the Apple Pencil Pro. The haptic feedback is clever in theory, but in practice, it feels like overkill. Having the Tool Palette pop up whenever it’s triggered quickly becomes more distracting than helpful (especially since not every app even supports the feedback).

As someone who’s mainly focused on note-taking, this isn’t a feature I particularly need. For example, in a note-taking app, I’m more likely to want to change the color than I am to mess around with the thickness of my notes. That can be tricky, especially in apps like Goodnotes, as they don’t quite respond to the touch features. Also, the accidental trigger of sensitivity can make my notes thicker and less legible if I’m trying to write quickly. Then, all the notes can look different from one another as I scribble. The Apple Pencil Pro can actually make it more difficult to do simple things on the iPad.