It can't charge from the iPad. It can't charge from USB-C. It can't charge from a Lightning charger.

You have to go out and buy a special charger that only charges the Apple Pencil and literally nothing else. It's a completely proprietary connection, a pointlessly inverted version of the Lightning connector, that never could and never will charge anything other than your stylus.

Despite Apple having the option of allowing it to charge from a Lightning cable, or Usb-C, or not charge at all and simply get power from the device light Samsung's S-Pen, Apple chose to opt for None Of The Above and allow the Apple Pencil to charge exclusively from the specific Apple Pencil charger.

Why?

Because screw you. Because Apple makes money when you buy that 20$ charging adapter and doesn't care that you have to carry that adapter with you everywhere now.

They could have made it charge from the iPad charger.

They could have made it charge from the iPhone charger.

They could have made it charge by attaching to the iPad.

They could have powered it wirelessly like Samsung and never need charging at all.

But no. They chose the worst of all worlds, the most painful, expensive, and inconvenient possible option, and allowed it to only charge from a specific "First generation Apple Pencil Charger" that isn't included with the iPad or even the Pencil itself.

That's right, you go out today and buy a brand new iPad and a brand new Apple Pencil, and you can't use the Pencil. At all. You have to also but the separate Apple Pencil Charging Adapter. Because Fuck You. We're Apple and Fuck You.

Basically, "If the pen fits in the keyboard slot, it just works". I'm currently using a pen from a Surface Pro 7 on my new Surface Pro 12" and it was trivial to connect it and it works great

For Wacom at least, it's not that bad, there are product lines (which are further sub-divided into generations):

- Pro: Intuos/Cintiq

- consumer

- specialized mobile/folding

and the styluses are specific to each, except for products which straddle a divide such as the Movink, or the strange case of a folding phone where the stylus uses the same frequency as the eraser of the consumer line (I suspect to prevent folks from damaging the hinge with a hard tip).

That said, it's pretty easy to gut a Wacom stylus and place the innards in any shell one wants.

That said, I miss some of the older products --- esp. the tracing pucks and the "airbrush" handles and the stylus ID which allowed one to assign different tools in Painter to different physical styluses and switch by putting one down and grabbing another.

That said, it's just magical that I can: take a note on my Kindle Scribe, switch to drawing on my Wacom One or Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360, and _not_ have to switch tools, since they all use the same stylus technology --- best of all, I'll never have to spend a weekend at my mother-in-law's w/o a stylus, since the stylus in my Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ serves as a backup (and for expressive drawing on the go I can get the Lamy Wacom Stylus out of my bag).

+ wacom - https://github.com/linuxwacom/input-wacom/wiki/Device-IDs

+ digimend - https://digimend.github.io/tablets/

Both are in-kernel for most distributions.

Please report back on who wins the duel. I assume lances, not pistols?