the new iPad pro has its own new
accessory the Apple pencil which Apple
hails as completely familiar and
entirely revolutionary well we'll see
about that last week we had the iPad pro
on our teardown table and we've had to
wait an entire week to play with its
friend so today we're tearing down the
Apple pencil
hi I'm Gwendolyn with iFixit and today
we're tearing down the brand new Apple
pencil in order to see inside this
pencil we had to do some heavy lifting
or grinding but before we get to
grinding we started with the easy parts
the tip of the pencil came off without a
fight as it just unscrewed Apple was
nice enough to make at least this part
of the pencil user replaceable and they
even went as far as to include a spare
tip in the package a peek inside the tip
reveals a tiny metal bits chunk deeply
into the tip presumably to get as close
to the screen as possible this likely
connects to one of the two emitters in
the tip that allow the iPad pro to
determine the pencils angle and
orientation relative to the display and
adjust the pen stroke accordingly the
digitizer on the iPad pro should be able
to determine the distance from each
emitter to the screen and from that
calculate the angle of the pencil
relative to the iPad removing the
lightning connector was next on our list
so we brought out our eye opener to
soften the adhesive holding it in place
but unfortunately even soften the
adhesive wasn't going to be enough to
get the connector out easily and we got
our first teardown casualty a torn flex
cable when it came time to get into the
actual tube of the pencil we pulled out
all of our tear down tools eye opener no
heat gun no heat was not going to get us
into this device so we did what we had
to do and got out our Dremel sawing away
at the plastic outer casing allowed us
to finally pull out the metal tube
inside on the tube is a single tiny tri
wing screw just like we found on the
Apple watch now we're getting somewhere
maybe it turns out is back to dremel and
cutting to get this tube apart first to
come out where the battery and 10
and what looks like a charging chip
affixed to the flex cable we also got a
look at the teeny tiny logic board this
is the tiniest board we have ever seen
weighing in at a whopping one gram and
fold it in half to make the most of the
minimal space on the board we find the
STMicroelectronics ultra-low power 32
bit our ISC ARM based cortex m3 MCU if
you'd like to see the full list of chips
we've identified head on over to the
teardown
at ifixit.com we turn back to the metal
casing to extract the pen nib and look
for its sensor magic peeling up another
tiny board we find a set of three
matching ticks if we had to hazard a
guess we say these help sense pressure
possibly as the nib presses into the
body we've come to the end of our
teardown which means it's time to talk
repairability and iFixit it's our
mission to teach people how to repair
everything so we give every gadget we
tear down a repair ability score between
one and ten ten being the easiest to
repair and one being the most difficult
the Apple pencil scored a 1 out of 10
and here's why on the upside the pen nib
and cap can be replaced if worn out or
lost but on the downside it's clearly
not meant to be opened or repaired you
can't get in without destroying the
device the layers of plastic and metal
holding interior components are
impossible to remove without shredding
and finally the battery enough for a
12-hour run is impossible to replace
giving the device a limited lifespan for
the complete teardown including tons of
beautiful high-quality images head on
over to ifixit.com don't forget to
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