Your old Apple Pencil won’t work on the 3rd Gen iPad Pro

The highly anticipated third-generation iPad Pro was announced at Apple’s event yesterday evening, and it looks to be a very capable design tablet. Its new Adobe Photoshop capability, along with the updated Apple Pencil that now charges wirelessly via magnetic attachment, will make it any designer’s dream machine.

Unfortunately, in the Apple tradition of selling accessories you really need separately — you’ll need to buy the new Apple Pencil if you’re planning on owning the newest iPad Pro. Your old Apple Pencil isn’t compatible with the new iPad Pro, according to product descriptions on the Apple website.

The update was necessary and incompatibility inevitable, because the updated iPad Pro is fitted with a USB-C port instead of a Lightning port. This means you won’t be able to charge your older Apple Pencil (that still retails for around R2,000) that needs Lighting capability to charge, since you have to jam it into the (now old) iPad’s charge port to top it up. An Lightning-to-USB-C adaptor might work, but we’re not going to be the first ones to test that. 

The newly announced Apple Pencil charges wirelessly through the new iPad Pro, while sticking to the side of the tablet magnetically. It’s a very welcome innovation that keeps the Pencil safe and charged but this also means that anyone interested in an iPad upgrade at this stage would need to replace their old Apple Pencil too.

Although we don’t have local pricing for the recently announced Apple products yet, the new-gen Pencils are priced at $129 (roughly R1,900 at today’s exchange rate). Buying one over here will probably cost more than the current Apple Pencil’s R2k price tag.

Source: The Verge