1st Generation Apple Pencil Questions - What features would you want in the next Apple Pencil?

We are in our 3rd full year of deployment of about 1000 iPads, Logitech Rugged 3 cases, and 1st generation Apple Pencils, and in K4-3rd grades, we use Logitech Crayons.

We love the Apple Pencil and feel it's essential to the success of iLearn@OCS program. However, the 1st Generation Apple Pencil just turned 7 years old a couple of weeks ago. We are a year and a half away from a "refresh" and we are concerned about what the next "generation" pencil will look like with iPad version 11 in about 2 years. (At least we hope there will be a new one.)

  1. Will there still be an available "plug" on the end of the pencil? (I would assume USB-C in 2 years) so the pencil can charge on the fly without a charging system. The 2nd generation pencil is nice, but the magnetic charging option is not a viable solution for students with rugged cases.
  2. Will the pencil have "AirTag" capability built in? Currently, all the guts in the 1st generation pencils could make the pencil an extra AirTag device...but our biggest issue is students unable to locate their lost Apple Pencils that they drop or misplace. We need a way to find them.
  3. Will the price go down? We have been paying the same price ~$89 for about 5 years now for 7-year-old technology.
  4. Will the battery last longer than the day? The Logitech Crayon has figured out how to make their devices last about 2 weeks in a classroom. Can Apple find a similar solution?

I would love to know what others would want in an Apple Pencil designed for education.


4 replies

December 02, 2022

Some valuable considerations here, Matt! I'll be interested to see what kind of answers you get in the comments.

June 16, 2023

Jessica, I'm still waiting for any Apple Product people to comment on this... #crickets

January 16, 2023

I would love the eraser to be on the opposite end of the tip, like a traditional pencil. A lot of times I’m working and need to erase, it would be cool to flip the pencil and erase.

July 18, 2024

A little update. So Apple came through in a big way with the Apple Pencil Pro. While you need to upgrade from the iPad 9 or 10 to the iPad Air M2 to get it to function....(which we did when we refreshed this summer) we found out that "find my" is not compatible with MAIDs accounts. Apple, please give us a solution for students to find their school-issued Apple Pencils before school starts in Aug. You are so close. This is a vital need in schools that believe that the Apple pencil is critical to learning and have invested in this techonology.

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