Your tablet’s pen reaches the Mac as a pen, not as a mouse — pressure and tilt included. This page explains what is carried across, and what we leave to your drawing app.
While the pen is near the screen, every pointer event sent to the Mac carries tablet fields — pressure and tilt among them. Applications therefore see a pen, not an ordinary mouse movement, and pressure-aware brushes respond accordingly: press harder and the line thickens, ease off and it thins. There is no driver to install and no calibration step.
Touch the screen with anything else — a finger, the touchpad, a mouse — and tablet mode turns itself off; there is no setting or mode switch for this.
Pressure — how hard you press turns into brush width and opacity; it is carried in 256 steps.
Tilt — lay the pen over and the tilt is carried across too; apps that read tilt see the field.
Barrel button and eraser end — both act as a right click on the Mac, and which end you are using is reported to the app as well. We make no brand distinction: if your pen reports these ends, they work.
Hover — the cursor follows the pen in the air; you do not have to touch down.
Palm rejection — you can rest your hand on the screen while writing or drawing.
The pen is not captured over the on-screen keyboard — you can type with it too.
Drawing inside a browser? Use Firefox or a Chromium-based browser; that is where pen data reaches the web page.
The pen’s position is carried across as it is — we add no smoothing of our own. We tried it once and took it out, because it left the cursor trailing behind the pen.
What that means in practice: whatever stabilisation your drawing app is set to is what you get. There is no invisible second correction on top that you cannot switch off.
Your tablet’s own pen. Verified on device with the Samsung S Pen, the Huawei M-Pencil, and Honor and Casper pens. The pen needs no separate pairing or setting; it works as soon as the tablet is connected.
There is no separate setup for the pen; connect the tablet and start drawing.
