.jpg){kind=link}
Today, Apple announced new iterations of its iPad Pro. They"re the first major redesigns that the product line has received, ditching the Home button in favor of Face ID and narrowing the bezels, enlarging the screen on the smaller model and shrinking the body on the larger one.
There"s also a new Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard. As you"d expect, the keyboard doesn"t fit on older models, but what wasn"t immediately obvious is that the Pencil isn"t compatible either. That means that if you"ve already got an iPad Pro and the Pencil, and you"re thinking of upgrading, your existing one won"t work with the new one either.
The new Apple Pencil does have some nifty new features. For one thing, it finally attaches to the tablet magnetically, and it charges wirelessly while it"s attached. There"s no more awkward charging via the Lightning port. And the new iPad Pro models have USB Type-C instead of Lightning, so you wouldn"t be able to charge the old one that way anyway.
So it does make some level of sense. After all, if the new Apple Pencil needs to be attached to one of the new iPad Pros to charge, it"s not going to last very long. The old Pencil came with an adapter so you could charge it with any Lightning cable, so at least there"s still a way.
The new Apple Pencil is available for $129, while the old one is still being sold for $99.