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Comment by ant6n | Hacker News Reader

And it's not a Wacom-like active digitizer, you need to actually charge this thing. I feel the stylus that came with Windows XP tablet edition in 2002 was probably better than this.

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My surface also uses a battery in the stylus.

Two in fact. One for the pen and one for the button. At least on the SP3.

A €1 battery which lasts more than a year...

Yeah the force sensor is in the pencil, not in the screen.

Wacom force sensors are also in the pencil, but they get their power through induction or something from the tablet.

exactly (that's why they are called 'active digitizer')

Induction basically.

And everyone else uses batteries because of Wacom patents. At least that was the case 5 years ago.

Oh, is that why? I thought current multi-touch technology interfered with the Wacom-style force sensor, but I could have imagined that.

Nope. Surface Pro 1 (and 2?) used Wacom tech, had 10-point multitouch, and the stylus didn't need batteries or recharging. The induction stuff that Wacom does is pretty cool.

From what I remember when I had a wacom tablet in the 90s and 2000s, the tech was something like RFID where the active tablet would read the passive puck and stylus and get sub millimeter accuracy from triangulation. This included tilt and angle of the stylus.

The stylus pressure and buttons was a sensor on the stylus that was sensed by the tablet.

The screen or surface didn't have any sensors.

Very informative, thanks!

And Apple, the richest company on earth, can't afford a license, or what?

Wacom may well decide that the competitive advantage to them having better styluses than the ones Apple can make is worth more than any amount of money Apple could offer.

Wacom may not be willing to license it.

Beyond the issue of whether Wacom wants to license it in the first place, even if they did, it's probably a high per unit cost (Wacom is a premium-pricing sort of company), and it's in the tablet, not the pen. What percentage of purchasers will even want the pen? I'm guessing it'll be pretty low.

Depends on software support. I remember with WinXP tablet edition, it came with 'Windows Journal', which was good enough to take all my classnotes.

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