Earlier this week Apple achieved a wonder: It made the iPad Pro exciting again. The new tablet is a USB-C-powered beast that plays nice with external gadgets without the need for dongles, and it comes with an updated, wirelessly charged Apple Pencil that checks off many of the boxes on our wishlist.
But it didn’t take long for the implications of this design shift to settle in. You can’t use the older Apple Pencil with the new iPad Pro, and you can’t use the new Pencil with the older models. It all looked too much like “Apple being Apple,” as some critics might say, as the Apple Pencil’s new design forces iPad Pro owners to buy a new version of a device they probably already bought within the last year or two.
