For the past few months, I’ve been cheating with my Apple Pencil. instead of using Apple’s $129 Stylus with my iPad Mini for note taking, I’ve been using an alternative that I bought on Amazon for around $25. It looks almost identical, works almost as well, and even connects to and charges from your iPad. And while this $25 stylus doesn’t quite match all the features of the Apple Pencil, it does come very close to providing a similar experience for a fraction of the price.
The stylus I’ve been using is from a random brand called “StylusHome” but there are plenty of similar ones on Amazon for about the same price. It mimics the style of Apple’s second-generation Pencil exactly – if it weren’t for the logo on the first, you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart visually. It has a flat side that magnetically snaps to the edge of my iPad Mini (and an iPad Pro or iPad Air, too), where it also charges its battery. It even comes with a replacement tip in the box if the original ever wears out.
Amazon lists this Pencil clone for around $30, but it was about $25 when I bought it a few months ago. At the time of writing, there’s a discount plus a 10 percent coupon that brings it down to around $24. Compare that to the regular $129 price of the Apple Pencil or even the $90 to $100 it costs when it goes on sale, and that’s a pretty wide gap.
Given the price difference and the fact that it was Logitech’s Crayon, the world of third-party Apple Pencil options doesn’t really seem to exist, I really didn’t expect it to work that well. But the StylusHome Pencil is just as fast and responsive when writing on the screen as the Apple Pencil. It’s a bit lighter (15.2 grams vs. 17.9 grams), but otherwise feels exactly the same. It supports tilt shading but has no pressure sensitivity. That’s not a problem for me, since I only use it for writing notes, but if you’re an artist, you might miss that feature.
What I miss the most is the double-tap feature of the Apple Pencil, which allows me to switch between writing and erasing with just a quick double-tap on the side of the stylus. StylusHome doesn’t support this at all, just like the first-generation Apple Pencil, so you have to use the onscreen controls to switch between the stylus and eraser each time.
StylusHome also, unsurprisingly, doesn’t have as tight an integration with iPadOS as Apple’s Pencil. You don’t get a little pop-up notification telling you battery life when you stick it to the side of the iPad, for example. But it does support showing battery life in Apple’s battery widget, which you can place on your iPad’s home screen or in the widget tray on the left of your home screen. This is a good solution for me, since I never use the stylus enough to completely drain the battery anyway.
The fake stylus uses Bluetooth to communicate with the iPad, and there’s an initial pairing you need to do the first time you use it through the iPad’s Bluetooth settings menu. And when you use the stylus again after a while away, it won’t write on the screen because it’s gone to sleep. The remedy here is to stick it back to the side of the tablet for a second or two to reactivate it and try again; from there, it’s instantly responsive, just like the Apple Pencil.
For serious iPad users, those who perhaps create digital art for a living, I’d still recommend sticking with the original Apple Pencil. But if you’ve been curious about whether an Apple Pencil could enhance your iPad experience, whether it’s for casual doodles, browsing software, or taking handwritten notes, but you’ve been spooked by the high cost of Apple’s version, a version Copycats like this can give you many of the same features for a fraction of the price.
Photography by Dan Seifert / The Verge
