Steve Jobs left no doubts about how he felt about the humble stylus: he hated it.
So why is his company now selling one?
At Apple’s event in San Francisco Wednesday, the company unveiled a stylus called Apple Pencil that will be an accessory to its new jumbo-sized iPad Pro. Pencil will allow users to digitally draw on the Pro’s screen and take hand written notes.
Although Apple officials went into loving detail about how Pencil works and the technology inside of it, they didn’t directly address the disconnect. I mean, sure, chief designer Jony Ive thinks Pencil is great and all, but wouldn’t Jobs be turning over in his grave to see his company selling a stylus?
Well, maybe not.
It’s important to remember the context of Jobs’ comments about styluses. When he was unveiling the iPhone in 2007, he brought up styluses in talking about how users might interact with the new device. At that time, a stylus was often the primary way to interact with personal digital assistants like Palm’s devices and early smartphones like Palm’s Treo. It was plausible that Apple might require a stylus for the iPhone too. But Jobs made clear he thought that was a bad idea.
“Who wants a stylus? You have to get them and put them away, and you lose them,” he said. “Yuck! Nobody wants a stylus.”
Instead, as he soon made clear in his presentation, the primary way owners would interact with the iPhone was through their fingertips. His point was not necessarily that styluses were always bad in all circumstances, but that they shouldn’t be the primary way to interact with a handheld device.
Jobs commented again about styluses in 2010 at an event unveiling the newest version of iOS, the operating system underlying the iPhone and iPad. When talking about multi-tasking in the new version of iOS, he and other Apple executives were asked how users would close open applications. They wouldn’t need to, because the operating system would handle the job, former Apple exec Scott Forstall said. Jobs chimed in, “It’s like we said on the iPad, if you see a stylus, they blew it.”
Again, I think Jobs was trying to make the case that just like users don’t need a stylus to use the iPad, users wouldn’t need to manually close applications in iOS.
Given that, I don’t think Apple is necessarily repudiating those opinions by introducing the Pencil. The gadget is an optional accessory. You don’t need it to interact with the iPad. While it will be useful in some applications and may be needed to use some of the features in some of them, it won’t be required to operate the device or most of the programs for it.
Indeed, because it’s a $100 add-on that only works with the already pricey iPad Pro, most iPad owners won’t have one. Because of that, app developers in general likely won’t require it.
And that’s how Apple is pitching the gadget — as an optional device that will be useful in some applications.
“IPad’s all about multi-touch, and we’ll continue to use our hands to interact in amazing ways on iPad,” Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of worldwide marketing, said when he introduced the device at Wednesday’s event. “But iPad Pro is going to enable new classes of applications that require even greater precision than was ever possible before.”
You may think that’s just spin, a way to finesse the idea that the company is putting out a product that its co-founder would have hated. And it may be.
It also may just be a pragmatic business move. Apple’s iPad sales have been falling in recent quarters, and the company has been looking to reverse that trend. Company CEO Tim Cook has touted the device’s potential as a work tool for enterprise customers. But in that environment, it’s going up against a growing number of Windows-powered hybrid PCs that can act as both tablets and traditional notebooks and often feature styluses.
Of course, it’s hard to know what Jobs really would have thought about the launch of Pencil, because he was famously inconstant in his stated beliefs. He could say something with utter certainty one day, and then reverse course at a later date without batting an eye. He said that people wouldn’t want to watch video on tiny iPod screens — then introduced a video-playing iPod a few years later. He said that Apple wasn’t working on a tablet — only to introduce the iPad some years after that.
It’s perfectly conceivable that Jobs himself would have been perfectly comfortable getting on stage and pitching Pencil, his past statements on styluses blithely ignored and forgotten.
Even if he still would have hated having a stylus, when he left Apple right before he died, Jobs advised the company’s executive team to put out of their minds what he would have thought or wanted to do.
“Among his last advice he had for me, and for all of you, was to never ask what he would do. ‘Just do what’s right,'” current CEO Tim Cook said at Jobs’ memorial service.
In putting out a stylus, Cook and company seems to be taking that advice. We’ll have to wait to see if it really was the right idea.
Photo: Apple Pencil being used with an iPad Pro. (Courtesy of Apple)
