Apple's iPad Pro designers talk about thinness and the Apple Pencil shadow

"In the past, we had to rely 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."

Hopefully they will have a setting and graphic design that just makes it obvious. No subtlety. Haven't tried the Pencil Pro yet, but the roll angle sensor combined with hover and the graphic design of a fuzzy line on the displays does indeed look like magic. They should really lean into it. 

The shadow and the hover lets the user know how close the tip is to the display. That is really nice.

Next up is the feel of the Pencil tip on an oleophobic, smooth, hard glass. It's too smooth and noiseless for me. They are caught between not having something that scratches off the oleophobic layer while things that can cause friction tend to be scratchy. Right now, you would have to give up the contrast of the OLED for a textured layer to get there.

And, the scratchy sound is important. So important that I think they should simulate it through the speakers.

Making the iPad Pro thinner was also difficult, say the designers, but one of them, Molly Anderson, called it the number one priority for the device.

Yup. 0.7 lb for the 11" and 1 lb for the 13". 1.28 lb for the 2024 iPP13 model will hopefully be enough for it to be truly a handheld experience. Still, I think they need to shave off another 0.25 lb from that 1.28 lb. I would also get rid of the camera bump and go with lower performance cameras. Just have like four 6MP back cams that are 3.5 mm thick and do pixel fusion whatever, combining it into one 12MP image.

Anderson also says that getting to this form took iterating through many different designs -- and doing so in collaboration. "Our habit is to meet people in the studio," she said, "to put models on the table, sketches on the walls"

Hate this characterization of "design". The sketching, the models, the prototyping in a design studio is step 1 of 100 of a product cycle. The remaining 99 steps of the product are just as important, and it forces them to cycle back to new sketches, new models and new prototypes. They will have to do like tens of cycles for the outside and maybe hundreds of cycles for the inside. Just the work to write requirements (volume, shape, weight, electrical, power consumption) for the component vendors would drive most people to therapy.

Iteration, software combined with hardware and a attention to detail in time placing a M4 in a iPad Pro will be a blessing to those who buy it and with Recall Microsoft and Gemini Google around I don't think Apple is in a bad position this years WWDC is going to be fun for Apple.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMs18JdZAvc The first practical demonstration of the difference between tandem OLED and tandem OLED with Nano texture outside no one else bothered to actually show the difference they just talked about it.

I purchased the iPad Pro M4 13” 1TB Standard Glass along with the new Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro and the new Apple Pencil Pro. Here are some facts: