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Comment by diydsp | Hacker News Reader

>"artisanally crafted" (grammar)

Did an artisan craft it? No, it looks to me mass-manufactured to spec by someone or something who doesn't have a say in its design or the ability to individualize it. You mean "made of wood," but that's the most you can squeeze out. Please don't try to steal the thunder of actual artisans.

> "unique built-in eraser" > "unique sensor lets you flip Pencil to erase"

Yeah, the crappy Wacom knockoff I bought in 1998 had the same thing. Wacoms have the same thing. If you are like all the other, most popular, long-existing things, you are not a unique thing.

If they're delusional about this, what else are they delusional about? Why would I spend money to support hubris? Because I'll have some minor extension of my abilities within a double-walled garden?

Aim higher.

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>"Each Pencil has a unique character that will subtly change with years of use" > it's made of wood and wood has grains on it.

In the age of plastic, wood becomes unique and interesting. I'd love to see more components made with a beautiful wood casing rather than unfriendly plastic.

Wood was pretty interesting before the age of plastic, too.

> it's made of wood and wood has grains on it.

or that the wood will degrade over time too. I don't want wood. I want metal, unbreakable metal.

Initially I thought it was a simple parody piece "pencil" "paper" ... har-har.

Wasn't until I saw the component break down image that I realised it was for an actual product.

Completely agree that "artisanally crafted" means that an actual person manually engaged with the item to create a unique form. If it was cut by a computer running a machine then it definitely doesn't count.

I think they're selling this as a product for tablets. I haven't seen a capacitive stylus for tablets that supports erasing from the other side. I believe they're taking the type of product that has existed with Wacom-type tablets for a while and bringing it to the portable capacitive tablet world, with a tablet many consumers -- including many artists -- already own.

The Samsung Note stylus supports an eraser if I'm not mistaken as does the Surface stylus.

That being said, the carpenter pencil shape is not one I'm overly fond of.

Those styluses are also about 1/2 the price of Pencil.

I mostly meant capacitive styli. Pencil is kind-of a hack in this way.

Actually I went and did some searching and even found a few roundups of dozens of styli and didn't find any with an eraser for iPads/regular Android devices. So I think you're right.

The Surface Pro has had this since its release.

They aren't taking the type of product that has existed with Wacom type tablets and bringing it to the portable capacitive world. This is going to be terrible in comparison.

Its impossible to make a capacitive stylus that isn't like drawing with a giant, cumbersome crayon.

>> Its impossible to make a capacitive stylus that isn't like drawing with a giant, cumbersome crayon.

Which is why I think Apple needs to offer a version of the iPad with a Wacom-style digitizer.

Steve Jobs' famous quote "If you see a stylus they blew it" might apply for UI navigation, but it doesn't apply for a lot of other use cases, including the ones that Pencil is trying to address.

> Steve Jobs' famous quote "If you see a stylus they blew it" might apply for UI navigation

I don't even think it's all that true in that case either. Jobs' stylus ban did serve as a useful forcing device: with a stylus available, pre-iPhone developers of touch UIs tended to fall back to producing bad ports of the WIMP concept, complete with buttons of minute size. But at the same time it would certainly have been possible to produce a good smartphone/tablet UI that was stylus-enabled. In fact I think you could, for example, port the original iPhone's UI to a stylus-only basis fairly smoothly. You'd need a couple of extra physical buttons for call accept/reject and other instant-response actions, and you'd need some alternatives for the few places where two-finger pinch/spread gestures are really important, but otherwise it would be a pretty straightforward port with, I think, a very usable result: only slightly less appealing than the finger-touch original. Overall it seems pretty similar to Jobs' ban on cursor keys on the original Macintosh, which probably helped make early Macintosh software more Mac-native but was rolled back without difficulty later.

Agreed that the lack of proper stylus support is an increasingly glaring lack in the iPhone/iPad line, the largest iPads in particular.

>> I don't even think it's all that true in that case either.

I don't disagree, that's why I used "might" as a weasel word.

All good. Weasels are beautiful, intelligent creatures. ;)

A Double entendre if ever I saw one, leave it to the greatest salesman of the 21st century!

I've used one that worked like a pen. It had a small plastic disk at the tip that swivelled so it would keep contact and not slip. I never found out who made them though. It didn't feel like a giant cumbersome crayon though.

I've used one of those and I found it to be an equally terrible experience. Not sure if they fixed them, but the first few generations of that product left scratches on the screen.

Recently came across this on kickstarter : http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/227221698/truglide-apex-... - says it has 2.4mm tip (also says 5mm some other place - but that too is equally small) This one is w/o the "disk"

HTC made one like that

Probably an Adonit Jot. http://adonit.net/jot/classic/

The term for breathless marketing is "Modern Wank".

did you just coin that term? it's pretty apropos!

Wait, what?

It's a marketing page. They took an existing product, and (assuming it works, which is a safe assumption based on their other products) made it simple and beautiful. Most successful companies do this.

You don't have to buy it. I use Paper, though, and I can't wait to get my Pencil in the mail.

Marketing is not an excuse for incorrect claims.

I don't think they lied. Like someone said below, "artisanal" is used for everything now. It's become more of a marketing term. It may not be right, but don't blame 53 for this.

> "artisanal" is used for everything now. It's become more of a marketing term.

I don't think these 2 concepts are unrelated, nor do I believe one excuses the other.

> It may not be right, but don't blame 53 for this.

I disagree. I don't care if a million other companies are doing it, if it's incorrect then it is still incorrect, whether they were the first or the thousandth.

That's like saying don't hate the player, hate the game. Fuck that. Every person who writes marketing copy like this is partially responsible for creating the sea of cognitive bullshit we all have to wade through every day. It's gross.

See also: "welcome to adjective", or "where adjective happens" slogans.

It's not hard to write honest copy with a good product. There are a mountain of accurate descriptions that work in place of 'unique, artisanal'.

Artisanal, Reluctant Branding Pioneer, Dies at Age 474

He is survived by his wife, Organic, and their two small boys, Natural and Green, as well as his cousin Hipster, though the two had fallen out in the '70s and were no longer on speaking terms.

http://www.thewire.com/entertainment/2012/05/artisanal-reluc...

Groovy!

While marketing is not an excuse for incorrect claims, any text on a salespage is assumed to be copy. Copywriting by definition, is persuasive (biased) and meant to influence you to buy the product. I think this sales page is pretty good.

> Marketing is not an excuse for incorrect claims.

You must be new to planet earth. ;-)

Just because a harmful activity is widespread, doesn't mean it's okay to do it.

> made it simple and beautiful

Which product has been simplified? Presumably not a pencil :P

aren't you being just a bit... pendantic?

Please get the joke, please get the joke.

now you're just rubbering it in...

artisan is used to sale everything from string cheese to dunkin donuts sandwiches these days. Singling these guys out for using it seems kinda silly.

It's marketing. They are going after the Apple iPad crowd.

This type of marketing speaks to that crowd as its similar to Apple's.

Most people that have an iPad and want to do writing on it, have likely gone through at least a couple of stylus's or even more to find one that works well for their needs.

I would say I am one of these people so I find this product useful. Will I buy it? Don't know yet but the marketing is effective for their market.

The video is a brilliant piece of marketing - they are selling not the product called 'pencil', but the life-style/idea of a genuis artisan. Buying the product will make you become what you've always wanted - creative, expressive, artsy.

It uses the same tactics as apple marketing copywriting - don't sell the product, sell the life-style the product implies. I bet it's working, because i also felt great watching the video.

Or perhaps i m now overly cynical about all marketing.

Sounds like what the Solaris folks were saying to the Linux people years ago.

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