When Is It Time to Replace Your Kindle Scribe Pen Tip?

YOU MIGHT LIKE...

How I Fine Tune Focus on Jupiter

November 6, 2023

Expectations through the Telescope

December 16, 2016

I take a lot of notes, or at least, more notes than I assume the average person. I have written about this before. Reviewing my 2019 accounting, I started to think about note taking in the AI era, especially for kids, students. Here is a tidal shift in intellectual practice that I cannot imagine ends well, compliments of AI. I have experienced it at work—meeting transcriptions are ridiculously easy to draft now, but without a human to thoroughly read, review, edit, and finally publish from that draft, the result can be worse than not taking any notes at all.

But you’re not here for an AI lecture. And you likely do not need one, since you came to get insight on when is a good time to replace the pen tip on your Kindle Scribe. You have probably searched the Internet, and discovered a handful of ~1 minute YouTube videos that show you how to replace the tip, but are obliviously as to when the tip should be swapped out. I find this last point curious, because if any of those YouTube creators spent 5 seconds showing the old and new tips, they would have increased the value of their content tenfold.

There does not seem to be a hard, no pun intended, answer as to when you should replace the tip. I started using my Kindle as my primary note taker a few months ago, and recently noticed the “feel” of the pen was like pencil graphite that required sharpening. So since I have a bunch of tip (they are cheap), I decided to (1) replace the tip and (2) take an image of both side by side to see what the wear looks like. Check out this article’s accompanying header image.

The “before” is on the left i.e. the tip that I had just taken out of my Kindle pen for the first time. You can see it resembles a house roof, with two flat sides and a steeple point at the top. The new pen tip is fully rounded.

Gleaming from this very high magnification, it appears there is a difference in material between the actual pen tip and the base which aligns into the pen. And the ‘felt’ part is only at the very top. If I had to guess, I likely had at least a few more weeks of wear available on old tip before it would have been near-unusable.

I can’t say the new tip feels a whole lot different, but I can subtly notice that I do not need to keep rotating it in my hand, like to find the sharpest point as on a pencil.