Apple Pencil 1st Generation

The Apple Pencil was announced alongside the very first iPad Pro in September 2015 and went on sale that November for $99. It had a smooth, rounded, pencil-like shape in glossy white, with a magnetic cap on one end that popped off to reveal a Lightning connector used for both charging and pairing.

Pairing was as simple as plugging that connector straight into the iPad's own Lightning port, no button to press, no menu to dig through, it just connected over Bluetooth automatically. A small female-to-female Lightning adapter came in the box too, letting you charge it via a normal Lightning cable and wall plug instead if you didn't want it sticking straight out of the iPad. Built-in pressure and tilt sensors let drawing apps vary line thickness and shading depending on how hard or at what angle you pressed, and the iPad could tell a finger touch apart from the Pencil, so you could rest your hand on the screen while writing without it registering as an accidental touch.

Battery life was rated at around 12 hours of typical use, and in a pinch, just 15 seconds plugged in was enough for roughly 30 minutes more. The plug-in charging method, watching it stick awkwardly straight out of an iPad, became a bit of a running joke online, and it was one of the first things 

Apple addressed when the redesigned 2nd generation Pencil arrived with magnetic charging a few years later.