I just had a problem with my new iPad Air 2024 and the Pencil Pro. After reseting the iPad due to a change of MDM provider, the Pencil Pro could no longer be paired with the iPad.
The problem is, all of the diagnostic information about the Pencil is displayed on the iPad… All the information Apple Support wanted or needed is on the Info page of the Settings App. Only, the Pencil won’t pair with the iPad, so there is no information I could give them!
I tried everything on the Apple Support site, but nothing worked. I had a great chat with a support person, but they couldn’t really do anything to help me, so they organized that the supervisor called me back - that took less than 15 seconds!
The supervisor also couldn’t help, it looks like the Pencil is dead… So they are sending me a replacement.
But the design of the Pencil is so minimalist that there is literally no way to tell whether it is working or not, whether the battery is dead or not, whether Bluetooth is working or not. You literally cannot perform any diagnostics on the Pencil as to why it isn’t working, unless it is working and connected to an iPad!
A simple LED would have saved me about 4 hours of trouble shooting and another hour chatting and talking to Apple Support. Even, not lit = battery dead, red light battery low, green light charging, blue light Bluetooth active would have cut down the amount of time needed to troubleshoot to mere minutes instead of wasting hours of time…