Hacker News Reader

Comment by xd1936 | Hacker News Reader

xd1936

Apple: "Every iPad now has USB-C"

Us: "Great, so we don't have to deal with that awful 1st-Gen Apple Pencil charging anymore?"

Apple: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MQLU3AM/A/usb-c-to-apple-...

The whole Apple Pencil situation is pretty annoying. The 1st Gen charging style is ridiculous and should never have been designed that way. The 2nd Gen, however, has another problem entirely: it drains the iPad's battery even when fully charged. Leaving it snapped to the side of the iPad overnight will destroy the standby time in order to keep the pencil at 100%. This is dumb! After a few days the iPad will be completely dead but the pencil will be 100%. Thanks, Apple!

I wish they'd license the battery-free stylus technology from Wacom. Charging the pencil all the time is so annoying that I hate using it.

My iPad mini (6th generation) drains in a few days without a Pencil attached to it, and nothing I've been able to do manages to improve standby time noticeably. I think your blame is misplaced on the Apple Pencil. Apple needs to fix standby time on iPadOS across the board.

There may be something else draining yours. Battery life is an Anna Karenina principle [1] problem. There are many possible causes of battery drain. There is only one way to have long-lasting battery: the absence of all those sources.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle

Yes, but all of that applies to you as well. At least two people have reported no battery drain with the Pencil attached: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33250550

How certain are you that you've controlled all the variables? If the Pencil was the cause of a widespread issue, then I have to imagine lots of articles would be being written about this and Apple would be taking it seriously.

As it is, I think that iPadOS just has a variety of things that can trigger bad battery life, and that's much harder for Apple to tackle than a single, easily-defined issue like the Apple Pencil affecting battery life would be.

People who write articles about battery life generally lack the skills or experience to actually diagnose such things correctly.

iPad standby time can be quite long, assuming you're keeping track of all the things it's doing while in standby. If not, well, the device has plenty of stuff that it likes to spin up and keep running in the background.

Are you sure it's the pencil? My M1 iPad Pro discharges to 0 within 3-4 days whether I have the pencil attached or not.

and my M1 iPad Pro does not. Might be worth checking the battery usage after a day of standby to see what is using significant amount of power while backgrounded.

Pretty sure. My standby time extends by a few days if I leave the pencil off instead of attached.

I have my doubts - my iPad Pro 11 M1 does not discharge at all with the pencil attached, standby time is easily two weeks.

Same

omg I had no idea what was draining my battery. This explains so much. Holy crap.

Until you test it for yourself, I wouldn't get so excited. I disagreed with their conclusion entirely in another comment already, as did several other people.

Yeah, insane choice. Here’s a visual from Twitter:

https://twitter.com/_alexguyot/status/1582405085484953601

To be fair, both are pretty bad solutions.

Yes, that's... exactly the point being made. The solution that every single iPad with USB-C used before today isn't pictured in that tweet, and it is far better. Apple made a really annoying choice here.

Right. The Apple Pencil 2 (used on more expensive iPads) connects to the side of the iPad magnetically and charges that way. It looks nice and works fine.

The original way (stick straight out of the port) worked but was always weird. They had a chance to fix it and… compromised?

The “fixed” the iPad by going USB-C, which is good. They don’t have to redesign the first Pencil which is fine (it’s cheaper than v2) but that left them with… this.

Very un-Apple. More than the original.

I wonder how many kids have swallowed the pencil cap.

Bad apple for not coating it in the nasty-tasting stuff used for Nintendo Switch game cards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com