Apple engineers exploring ways to improve the Apple Pencil got a patent for a stylus tip that can change its shape or stiffness. The goal might be to make a paintbrush for an iPad so digital painting feels more like the real thing.
It’s a concept the company has looked into for years.
Patent explores the future of Apple Pencil
Many artists use an Apple Pencil to sketch and draw on an iPad. The stylus offers pressure sensitivity, like a regular pen, to make digital drawing closer to the real thing. But it’s still writing with a thin tip on a hard surface, which feels significantly different from using many other writing implements.
Apple engineers appear to be working on the problem. On Thursday, they were awarded a patent entitled “Stylus With Adjustable Features.”
In the stilted language traditional for patent filings, the description says, “An input device, such as a stylus, can include adjustment capabilities that changes a size, shape, stiffness, or other characteristics of a portion of the stylus, such as the tip. The size, shape, stiffness, or other characteristics of a tip of the stylus can be altered to mimic characteristics of a particular writing or drawing tool.“
The stated goal is an Apple Pencil that can mimic a range of traditional artists’ tools, including a pen, pencil, chalk and marker.
An Apple Pencil as paintbrush, too?
The engineers went all the way to thinking about making an Apple Pencil into an Apple Paintbrush. It’s possible to paint with a stylus, too, but that doesn’t mimic the real-world experience at all. A slim, rigid tip feels very little like a wide, flexible paintbrush.
But the patent filing specifically mentions making the iPad stylus mimic a paintbrush. They refer to the device being able to take on multiple bristles. And the filing also includes drawings suggesting something of what an Apple Paintbrush might look like.
This is what the Apple engineeers envision for a possible Apple Paintbrush.Patent illustrations: Apple
This is a product area in which Apple engineers have been working for most of the last decade. Back in 2019, the company got a patent for a “Stylus with multiple inputs” describing a stylus with flexible contact members. In other words, bristles like a paintbrush.
How a stylus can be made into a paintbrush isn’t clear. Perhaps an add-on attachment to an future Apple Pencil?
All that said, just because Apple is exploring a digital paintbrush doesn’t automatically indicate that it will ever become an actual device. Companies regularly patent ideas that never turn into shipping products.
