iPhone 7 will be compatible with Apple Pencil, remarks from CEO Tim Cook could suggest

Steve Jobs had mocked the idea of a stylus – but Mr Cook has said that people are using Apple's Pencil previously unimagined ways

A man uses the new Apple Pencil on an iPad Pro after an Apple special event at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium September 9, 2015 in San Francisco, California (Stephen Lam/ Getty Images)

Tim Cook might have spoiled one of the biggest features of the iPhone 7.

The Apple CEO’s comments in a recent interview have resurfaced as a potential hint at what might be coming in the new phone.

The interview – conducted in May for an Indian TV station – seems to suggest that Apple is about to bring the Apple Pencil that was introduced with the iPad Pro to the iPhone.

Asked about whether Steve Jobs would have been disappointed to see that Apple introduced a stylus with the iPad Pro, something that the late co-founder had publicly mocked, Mr Cook said that he wouldn’t. If Mr Jobs saw what was being done with them, he said, he’d have been pleased.

“If you’ve ever seen what can be created with that pencil on an iPad or an iPhone, it’s really unbelievable,” Mr Cook said.

Some, including technology commentator John Gruber, took the quote to potentially mean that Apple is adding support for its new Pencil to the iPhone 7.

It’s possible that Mr Cook didn’t mean what the quote seems to say, Gruber noted – that he simply forgot that the pencil wasn’t available for iPhone. Or it might be that the sentence actually had a comma before iPhone, and Mr Cook was using it as a way of speaking about creativity more generally. But it might not.

There haven’t been any leaks either way on Apple Pencil support for the iPhone 7. It would however make sense, since Apple tends not to bring new technologies across its line – the Force Touch pressure-sensitive screens that launched in the Apple Watch then moved to the iPhone, for instance, and are expected to arrive on the iPad at some point.

But adding Apple Pencil support isn’t a simple thing. It currently only works with specific screens – the two versions of the iPad Pro – because the devices themselves have to be built to support it.

Apple is set to reveal the new phone at an event on Wednesday. Aside from Pencil support and some other unknowns, much has already been leaked about the phone – including the fact that the design will be largely the same, that it will be much faster, an improved camera and the removal of the headphone jack.