Released alongside the iPad Pro, the Apple Pencil let’s you draw, take notes, mark up documents, annotate photos and do basically anything you can do with a traditional pencil. It’s also an excellent precision input device for the iPad Pro, and makes it easy to select small menu items or finely adjust app controls.
Included with the Pencil, is a spare tip, as well as a Lightning-to-Lightning adapter that lets you charge the pencil with a regular iPad or iPhone charger.
In this TechRepublic teardown gallery, I walk you through the process of cracking open the Pencil and show you the tiny tech inside.
To watch a video of the teardown and read my full analysis, check out my article, Cracking Open: Apple Pencil is powered by amazingly tiny tech.
The pencil connects to the iPad Pro via Bluetooth and charges via a Lightning connector, hidden under a magnetic cap. According to Apple, a full charge will last about 12 hours.
The Apple Pencil has some of the smallest internal components I’ve ever seen. This photo shows a pair of circuit boards, folded on top of each other and attached to the battery.
I’m not sure why Apple used screws inside a device that is clearly not meant to be taken apart, but here they are…six, amazingly tiny tri-wing screws.
Powering the Apple Pencil is a 3.82 V, 0.329 Wh lithium-ion battery.
The Apple Pencil’s two system boards are connected by a pair of flat-flexible cables. Mounted to the inner surfaces of the boards are a 32-bit RISC ARM-based Cortex-M3 MCU from ST Micro, and three other chips with unknown functions.
A CSR1012A05 Bluetooth chip from Cambridge Silicon Radio CSR (now part of Qualcomm) is mounted to the outer side of one system board.
Thanks to a series of internal sensors (shown in this photo), the Pencil can detect how hard the tip is pressed against the tablet and the tip’s angle as you move it across the screen, allowing you to make light lines, thick lines, and shaded areas.
The Apple Pencil is definitely NOT meant to be taken apart. Which is a real shame, because other styluses, like the Pencil from FiftyThree can be disassembled.
Despite being one of the more destructive teardowns I’ve done, it was also a lot of fun and very educational.
Bill Detwiler is the Editor for Technical Content and Ecosystem at Celonis. He is the former Editor in Chief of TechRepublic and previous host of TechRepublic's Dynamic Developer podcast and Cracking Open, CNET and TechRepublic's popular online show. Previously, Bill was an IT manager in the social research and energy industries. He has bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Louisville, where he has also lectured on computer crime and crime prevention.
