This is not a review, nor a post where you’ll find all about the technical specs of the new iPad Pro. This is not a post where you’ll be told that “the new iPad Pro with the new M2 chip is the worst Apple product of 2022”, nope.
What is this, then?
This is a post about my experience with a new feature of the new iPad Pro M2: the Apple Pencil Hover.
Now, I don’t know whether it should be totally possible to implement this feature on the old iPads, I don’t doubt it, but I also don’t think it’s that simple. Yeah yeah, other devices has this feature for a long time already, but they are different devices, different brands, different implementations.
Of course, maybe Apple could’ve implemented this before, but they didn’t, and it is what it is.
Apple Pencil Hover
Ok, so a couple of days ago I bought the new iPad Pro 11” with the new M2 chip, just because of the hover feature. Before that, I was using a iPad Pro 11” 2018, and it was still performing extremely well, at least for my type of use — drawing and painting.
But there was one thing missing: a way to display a preview of the pencil tip before it touches the screen. Thankfully, that was solved with the new iPad using the M2 chip.
The hover feature works as you might expect, once the tip of the pencil is close to the screen you’ll be able to see the “cursor”, or in some apps like Procreate (5.3 and later) the shape of the brush.
Speaking of Procreate, they did an impressive job with their implementation. You not only have the brush shape preview, but also the brush color preview. And that’s not all, if you have the eraser selected, you’ll see a preview of how that part of the canvas will look like after you erase it. Just brilliant.
I’m excited to see what Adobe will do with Fresco.
Mirroring the screen + hover
Before the release of the Apple Pencil Hover, you could still mirror your iPad to a bigger screen. However, it was kinda useless, since you’d still need to be looking at your iPad screen, to see what you were actually drawing/painting.
With the new Apple Pencil Hover, that’s not longer an issue. Finally, you can use your iPad as a drawing tablet, but also have the option to have a fantastic screen available.
In conclusion
I’m seriously considering in selling my Wacom Cintiq Pro 24. Having such a versatile device like an iPad is priceless, not to mention its portability.