Lost Apple Pencil keeps showing as connected

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Lost Apple Pencil keeps showing as connected

Lost Apple Pencil, but says Connected

Today is Thursday. On Tuesday at about 13:30 I lost my Apple Pencil in school, Block S - Classroom 13. While picking up my iPad the pencil fell off and ‘landed’ into my friends lap except it wasn’t even there. We immediately started looking and we couldn’t see it. He didn’t take it, and we searched the entire room for it to not be there.

After school on Tuesday at about 19:50 I checked my iPad to see if the Apple Pencil was connected and it said not connected.

Yesterday, Wednesday, I went into school in the morning at around 08:30 and stood outside of Block S - Classroom 13 and looked on Bluetooth of my iPad, it said it was connected to the Apple Pencil. It seemed to have remained connected until about 13:10 where it no longer said connected.

Today I returned to Block S - Classroom 13 at around 09:05 and it said connected, but at around 09:37 it no longer said connected.

At 09:55 I walked from Block S to Block D (at least 100m journey) for a lesson and it remained connected for the entire walk, and also remained connected until about 10:15 during my lesson in Block D until it was no longer connected.

I returned to Block S at around 11:00 and it was connected again, and it was also connected from around 11:30 to 12:25 for the entire time I was in Block D again in that period.

Finally, I went to my car at about 12:30 and somehow it said connected. Another friend was in the car with me and he checked his entire bag: nothing.

After I dropped him off and drove to the gym, I checked once more and it was somehow connected in the gym parking lot. It can’t possibly be in my car or on me, it just vanished the moment it dropped onto his lap.

What kind of absurdity is happening here?

iPad, iPadOS 26

Posted on Nov 20, 2025 5:32 AM

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Answer 1

Tesserax

Level 10

157,704 points

Nov 20, 2025 9:22 AM in response to forehand_connoisseur

Short answer:

It definitely feels absurd when the connection behavior makes absolutely zero sense, but there is a technical explanation behind what you’re seeing—and it isn’t supernatural, nor is your Pencil magically teleporting around. What you’re really running into is the way the Apple Pencil (especially Gen 2) handles Bluetooth LE pairing, caching, and its ultra-loose proximity requirements when the Pencil isn’t actually present.

A bit longer answer:

When a Gen 2 Pencil is lost, its Bluetooth identity can “linger” on your iPad for hours or even days. The iPad will periodically report it as connected even if the Pencil is nowhere nearby, simply because the iPad holds on to the last known LE connection state and keeps attempting silent background handshakes. If the Pencil’s battery died shortly after you dropped it—and it probably did—your iPad may still be cycling between “connected” and “not connected” as it tries to re-establish a link with a device that’s no longer responding. That creates the illusion that the Pencil is moving with you, even though the iPad is just switching states on its own.

To put it plainly: your iPad is not actually detecting the Pencil’s location. Bluetooth LE range isn’t even close to what you experienced, and a dead Pencil cannot follow you from building to building and then into your car and the gym. Your iPad is reacting to cached connection data, and it will keep doing that until it fully ages out the pairing session or you tell it to stop trying.

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