By Brian Roemmele,
Although Steve famously mocked the very idea of a Stylus for a smart phone and perhaps the Personal Digital Assistant(PDA), he never said that there was no use for a stylus.
Steve argued that the stylus would get lost and are never around when you need it, and he was right. There was a very firm foundation for his justification, in the epoch Steve was making this statement, there were dreadful products where the only input mechanism was a Stylus. Yes this includes the Apple Newton, which he canceled for many additional reasons.
Ironically Jony Ive designed both the Telescoping Apple Newton Stylus and the new Apple Pencil. However the very premise of each device is from remote universes. The Apple Newton was hobbled by a singular method of input. Jony did the best he could with the limitations of the Newwton's interface methodology.
Steve was speaking to the tyranny of the Stylus as the single input method and device. Of course this was in contrast to the use of our fingers, an input system that was utterly flawed in the epoch just before the iPhone 1. The iPhone 1 completely changed the way we interact with our devices. No longer were we bound to the keyboard, mouse, touchpad or stylus, we could reach out and touch things.
The Apple Pencil As An Additional Input Method
With the iPad Pro, Apple has not abandoned what we now take for granted, touch. Apple has done what they are famous for, what makes them the company that has change so much in the way we interact with our data, they have refined the experience. They made it more exacting.
It turns out Apple has been submitting patents on a regular schedule for a stylus device for the last decade, while Steve was presiding over the direction of the company. I have been tracking Apple patents since the late 1970s and was as certain that Apple would create a stylus input method as I was that Apple would enter into payments.
Here is one of the latest patent examples. It may now look very familiar:
Apple Pencil Is All About Accuracy And Control
The Apple Pencil is fundamentally about accuracy. An astounding 240 times per second, data is scanned to allow for the most finite control. This is 2 times the rate of the current iPad when using a finger. This accuracy is to the level of an individual pixel on the new iPad Pro screen. This is an order of magnitude more exacting then any Apple input device. This means that one can now, with the tip of the Apple Pencil, manipulate one of the 2732 x 2048 pixels, any 264 of them per inch to an extent never possible on an iPad and on most computers, with out rather expensive external Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems. Of course Apple Pencil will not replace these systems, nor was it designed for this purpose. Apple Pencil allow far more people to participate. This a hallmark of how Apple creates products for "the rest of us". This is really the basis for the refined thinking that leads to the Apple Pencil.
The entire industrial design team at Apple, including Jony Ive use a Stylus every day to build Apple products. In 20/20 hindsight the Apple Pencil was a simple and logical step for Jony and his team. Thus the Apple Pencil is right in line with the design philosophy and ethos that has made Apple the company they are today, and right in line with the philosophy and ethos of Steve Jobs. Today September, 9th 2015, one could feel his presence in the room.