Apple is in serious trouble. Not because of artificial intelligence, China, Samsung, or some catastrophic collapse of the global economy. No. The pencil.
Captain Plum predicts Apple will go bankrupt unless it solves the Apple Pencil. Wall Street has apparently overlooked this existential threat, which is understandable: analysts tend to study revenue, margins, and supply chains instead of checking whether a bloody pencil stays on the iPad.
Eleven Years to Invent a Pencil
The first Apple Pencil arrived in 2015. It is now 2026. Eleven years of technological progress. Apple engineers have mastered extraordinary processors, handwriting recognition, pressure sensitivity, tilt detection and haptic feedback. Yet Plum’s expensive stylus has a tip that works loose and a magnetic attachment he considers unreliable. A working instrument has become something to babysit.
The tip, to be clear, screws on. The magnet is what holds the Pencil to the iPad. These are TWO separate problems. Apple has achieved the remarkable feat of annoying Plum at both ends of the device.
Humanity invented the pencil centuries ago. The wooden version is cheap, stays in one piece, and can survive falling off a desk. Apple has produced the luxury version: hundreds of dollars of technological marvel with the defensive instincts of a buttered noodle.
Emergency Meeting in Cupertino
Imagine the Apple boardroom. ‘Sir, we have a crisis.’ ‘Is it AI?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘Our supply chain?’ ‘Worse.’ ‘Good God. What?’ ‘A physician in Newfoundland is angry about his pencil.’ Silence. An executive drops his iPhone. The entire market capitalization trembles.
‘How angry?’ asks the CEO. ‘He says we cannot make a fucking pencil.’ ‘But we gave it barrel roll!’ ‘He wants a barrel that stays attached, sir.’
The Plum Effect
This is how empires fall. First one customer loses a pencil tip. Then another customer buys a case with a little pencil sleeve. Then a third begins asking why a premium tablet requires an accessory to protect its accessory. Eventually someone in a boardroom notices the entire population of Newfoundland quietly buying ordinary pens.
Financial historians will call it the Plum Effect. Economists will write papers. There will be a documentary narrated in a grave voice: ‘They had trillions. They had genius. But they did not have a sufficiently determined pencil magnet.’
The Thousand-Dollar Pencil and the Bedsheet Search Party
Nobody should have to spend a thousand dollars over time just to keep owning a pencil. Lose one, replace it. Break one, replace it. Discover the tip has disappeared into another dimension, buy more tips. The cumulative bill can begin to resemble the financing of a small motor vehicle. At least the motor vehicle has the decency to stay parked.
But the greatest absurdity arrives at bedtime. Apple can help Plum find his phone, his iPad, his watch and various other expensive possessions. The pencil? If it is an older Apple Pencil, welcome to the world’s most expensive game of hide-and-seek. Under the bedsheets. Between the mattress and the wall. Possibly somewhere inside a pillowcase. The planet’s finest consumer-electronics company has apparently assigned Plum to the Search and Rescue Department.
To be fair, Apple finally added Find My to the Apple Pencil Pro in 2024. It can guide you toward the missing pencil on a compatible iPad. But it cannot play a locating sound, and older Apple Pencil models lack that Find My feature altogether. So after almost a decade, Apple’s historic breakthrough was to help you find a pencil that should not have fallen off in the first place.
‘Sir, we found it!’ ‘Where?’ ‘Under the duvet.’ ‘Excellent. Deploy the trillion-dollar engineering team. And somebody fetch the bloody tip.’
The $150 Pencil That Cannot Write on the $1,000 Phone
And Plum has discovered one more technological miracle: the $150 Apple Pencil does not work with the $1,000 iPhone. Not even to scribble a bloody note. The phone has a screen. The Pencil is designed to write on screens. Both come from Apple. Yet put them together and you have two expensive objects refusing to acknowledge one another.
Imagine buying a beautiful fountain pen, then learning it works only on the manufacturer’s specially approved paper, which you must carry around separately. Apple’s answer to the pocket notebook is apparently to purchase an iPad and carry that too. Because who ever wanted the convenience of writing down an idea on the phone already in their pocket?
Somewhere at Apple headquarters, a genius has successfully engineered a pencil that recognizes a double tap but cannot write on the company’s own phone. WOW. Amazing technology, Apple. Plum suspects the ordinary fifty-cent pencil is looking increasingly clever.
To be precise, Apple Pencil is an iPad accessory, and no Apple Pencil model supports writing directly on an iPhone. The iPhone does accept finger input and certain basic third-party capacitive styluses—but not Apple’s expensive Pencil. That is the product choice Plum finds so spectacularly stupid.
The World’s Most Expensive Alarm Clock
And then there is the Apple Watch. Plum really did try to like the thing. He wore it, learned its tricks, explored its features and gave it every opportunity to justify its existence. His final assessment? A square, ugly, insufficiently customizable, annoying little computer strapped to his arm.
He already has a computer on his desk, another in his pocket, and an entire technological civilization demanding his attention. The last thing he needs is a tiny wrist-mounted bureaucrat interrupting his life to announce that he has received a notification about something he never wanted to know.
Apple presents the Watch as a triumph of personal technology. Plum sees a small glowing rectangle that requires charging, configuring, updating and negotiating with. A traditional watch tells you the time. The Apple Watch would also like to discuss your activity rings, remind you to stand, and become emotionally involved in your calendar.
To be fair, Plum discovered one genuinely useful application: it wakes him up. Yes. After all the research, engineering, chips, sensors and advertisements, his favourite feature is the alarm.
It is a very expensive alarm clock.
Somewhere in Cupertino, an engineer has spent twelve years perfecting an optical heart-rate sensor. Meanwhile, in Newfoundland, Captain Plum is using the culmination of that achievement to go beep at seven in the morning.
The pencil cannot stay on the tablet. The watch cannot leave him alone. Apple has apparently confused making products more intelligent with making the owner’s life better.
And Don’t Get Plum Started on the Fucking Plugs
The pencil falls off. The watch interrupts. The pencil cannot write on the phone. And then, when everything finally needs charging, Apple asks Plum to find the correct fucking plug.
For years there was Apple’s proprietary Lightning connector. Then USB-C arrived on newer iPhones, after already appearing on many iPads and Macs. Somewhere in a drawer, Plum has cables and adapters from different eras of the same company’s allegedly seamless ecosystem. His drawer looks like an archaeological dig through the ruins of Cupertino.
Apple can point to technical reasons for some connector changes, and USB-C is a welcome move toward a common standard. Plum nevertheless suspects the long parade of proprietary plugs and accessories was rather profitable. He cannot prove that making money was the sole motivation. He can, however, testify that repeatedly buying cables and adapters pisses him off.
Imagine buying a toaster whose plug changes every few years. ‘Introducing ToastPort Ultra. Your old power cable is now a heritage accessory.’
Plum does not want to join a charging ecosystem. He wants to plug the bloody thing in.
Logic Pro: The Last Hostage
At this point, Plum can identify exactly one reason he still wants an Apple computer: Logic Pro. He makes music with it. It is powerful, capable, and central to his creative work. And, naturally, it is also a complicated piece of shit.
There is a beautiful irony here. Apple has managed to create music software sufficiently useful to keep a frustrated customer in its ecosystem, while apparently requiring him to earn an honorary engineering degree just to manage libraries, settings and the machinery surrounding the actual business of making a song.
The musician wants to record a guitar. The computer would first like to discuss storage locations, audio interfaces, software instruments, plug-ins, routing and precisely which folder contains the sound of a piano. Somewhere under all that administration, allegedly, there is music.
Plum does not want to become an unpaid technician in a company-sponsored obstacle course. He wants to write songs. Logic Pro may be the last Apple product he genuinely needs, and even that relationship is held together by creative necessity and a frankly unreasonable amount of swearing.
Imagine Apple’s next keynote: ‘We’ve made the most intuitive creative environment ever.’ Plum raises his hand: ‘Grand. Can I just record the fucking guitar?’
The Small Irritations That Become Large
The joke has a serious point. Customers forgive hard engineering problems. They are less forgiving when a luxury product makes a simple daily task unnecessarily irritating. When the pencil is used to draw, write, plan and think, staying attached is not an optional premium feature. It is the job.
Apple is not actually facing bankruptcy because Plum is irritated; the corporate catastrophe is satire. Nor does every Apple Pencil owner experience loose tips or weak attachment. But recurring complaints are real enough to make the criticism worth hearing.
Plum has a simple policy: remove unnecessary irritations from life. Apple, you have eleven years of pencil engineering behind you and extraordinary resources ahead of you. Make the tip stay on. Make the Pencil stay put. And perhaps postpone announcing the magical future of creativity until you have mastered the unmagical present of a pencil.
Otherwise Captain Plum may take his business elsewhere. At which point, obviously, the global economy will need to brace itself.
Order. Truth. Love. And for God’s sake, a pencil that stays put.
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