The one new feature that truly stands out with the 2022 M2 iPad Pros, is the hover dot the Apple Pencil gives you to indicate where you’re about to press. This registers earlier than before, meaning that you can hold the pencil a full 12 mm above the screen, and see where you’re heading.
This is helpful, I’m pleased to say.
I’m a pretty heavy Apple Pencil user. I use it for note-taking, as you probably know by now, as well as sketching and, at times, design work. That doesn’t mean that I’m an illustrator, and I don’t do a lot of drawing these days. This is a shame because although seeing where you’re heading in such a clear and concise way as the hovering dot lets you do, the truly useful application of such a feature would be to alter that state. The obvious use case would be in a drawing app, altering stroke width on the fly, without having to draw and undo to find the right size: You’d just get it because the hovering dot shows you. Of course, this requires the apps to get updates, something that’s due in Procreate, but not out there just yet.
For now, the default Notes app is the place to play around with this. I’ll get back to you on how the hovering dot actually changes my usage, if it indeed does that, eventually. For now, I’m optimistic, it’s a nice add-on for sure. Does it mean that it’s worth picking up the new M2 iPad Pros? Nah, this still stands.
