Gadgetory

this pencil is made of wood graphite a little bit of metal and a little synthetic rubber you can buy a whole box of them for a few dollars this pencil on the other hand costs $99 and I have no idea what's inside it let's find out I'm bill Detweiler and this is cracking open released alongside the iPad pro the Apple pencil lets you draw take notes mark up documents annotate photos and do basically anything you can do with a traditional pencil it's also an excellent precision input device for the iPad pro and it makes it easy to select small menu items or to make fine adjustments to app controls the pencil connects to the iPad pro via bluetooth and charges via a lightning connector it's hidden under a magnetic cap now according to Apple a full charge will last about 12 hours now thanks to a series of internal sensors the pencil can detect how hard the tip is pressed against the tablet and the tips angle as you move it across the screen this allows you to make light lines make thick lines and to shade the areas you're working with now included with the pencil is a spare tip as well as a lightning to lightning adapter that lets you charge the pencil with a regular iPad or iPhone charger with all the specs out of the way let's get cracking before cracking open our Apple pencil the first thing we're going to do is remove the magnetic cap that covers the lightning connector and then we're going to unscrew the tip now at first we tried to use a heat gun to remove the interior components by loosening the adhesive and then pulling them out the back of the pen when that didn't work we moved on to a rotary cutting tool to actually cut through the plastic and expose the interior components all right so finally once we're through cutting the plastic shell we can try and remove it here and if we lift it off very gently and pry it off there's still adhesive in here you can hear it kind of separate boom there we go and we can lift that off and we can actually see the metal cylinder that's inside the plastic cylinder so after cutting and a little bit of prying we were able to remove both the plastic shell and the inner metal shell and expose the internal components of the Apple pencil we have these sensors associated with the tip these will be the pressure and the angle sensors and we also have the main circuit board here the battery up here and then the Bluetooth probably antenna and then the lightning connector here on the end so what did we learn from cracking open the Apple pencil well for starters this thing is not meant to be taken apart which is a real shame because other styluses like the pencil from 53 can be disassembled and that brings me to my second observation if the pencil wasn't designed to be repaired why you screws inside the thing six of them maybe Apple just loves screws as for the brains of the pencil there's a 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 markings now powering all this is a tiny three point eight two volt 0.329 watt hour battery now there's also an antenna and the pressure and angle sensors near the tip despite being one of the more destructive tear downs I've done lately it was also a lot of fun now for more information on the iPad pro and the Apple pencil including real world tests from an artist and a video editor check out Scott Stein's full CNET review I'm Bill Detweiler thanks for watching