An iPad Pro with Apple Pencil Pro digital shadow designs
In a rare interview, key Apple designers reveal why they gave the new Apple Pencil that digital shadow, and how it's part of their overall goal for the future. iPad Pro.
When an iPad Pro user writes by hand on the device, the Apple Pencil Pro appears to cast a shadow that resembles a fountain pen. Or if the user is painting, the shadow is from a brush.
This is only something Apple would do because of its obsessive attention to detail. But now Apple's Steve Lemay, responsible for human-machine interaction, says this wasn't done just because it looked good.
“We used to depend on your own memory [of which tool you had selected,” said Lemay to French technology site Numerama (in translation). “We have imagined a digital shadow to make you feel like you are holding a real pencil. This convinces you that it is a sheet of paper.”
Lemay also said that just adding haptic feedback to the new Pencil “was one of the most difficult things.” It required the Apple Design Studio to “rethink the entire architecture [of the Apple Pencil].”
Making the iPad Pro thinner was also difficult, its designers say, but one of them, Molly Anderson, called it the first priority for the device.
“Portability is at the heart of the iPad experience,” says Anderson. “In 2010, our design intention was to use the first iPad to create a sheet of magical glass, a sheet of digital paper [and we] I've never been so close to this original idea.”
Anderson also says that arriving at this shape required working through many different designs – all in collaboration. “It is our habit to meet people in the studio,” she said, “to put models on the table, sketches on the wall”