Wait, what? Didn’t Steve Jobs absolutely loathe styluses? Wasn’t the iPad launched to annihilate all post-PC devices that required users to control them through a stylus? That’s true, to an extent. The fact remains that Apple has been pondering on stylus technology, trying to reinvent the wheel so to speak. We first saw a patent for one similar product back in 2012, and today the company has been granted yet another patent for a smarter stylus. This new Apple stylus, the “iPen,” was dreamt up back in 2011, that’s when the patent was originally filed.
The iPen wouldn’t be a conventional stylus, it will have an orientation sensor which will be able to determine the stylus’s orientation relative to the touch screen. This would result into much more accurate reproduction of hand-written input, as the stylus orientation can be used to adjust width and darkness of the line displayed on the screen. For example, if you were to hold a pen on the side of its tip and draw a line, the resulting line will be different as opposed to a straight drawn line. This will improve realism of the stylus experience, which was really what bothered Jobs in the first place, it didn’t feel too natural or intuitive. It goes without saying that merely patenting a technology doesn’t mean Apple has any plans of using it in the future. We can’t say if iPads in the future will come with their very own tablets, though there might be a lot of people out there waiting for just that.
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