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Comment by booleandilemma | Hacker News Reader

"If you see a stylus, they blew it." -Steve Jobs

This lazy out-of-context meme needs to die

https://www.quora.com/Was-Steve-Jobs-right-when-he-said-that...

This appears to be revisionist history. Jobs saw phone interfaces via stylus, noted they sucked, concluded that interacting with a handheld device with a stylus sucks on principal. You can agree or disagree but it seems nonsensical to try to add words to inject your own context to revise history to render jobs correct if you don't think the original statement as given was correct.

Further that link commits the usual sin of ascribing the invention of tech that apple popularized to apple for no reason. Multitouch and gestures goes back to the 80s see

https://inventhelp.com/archives/11-12/inventhelp-newsletter-...

Quora is kind of a low value source. I would refute author on quora but they want access to read and manage my google contacts to create an account. Kind of one step up from malware I'm pretty sure they intend to use it to spam my contacts.

The context any statement is made in is very important and can't be ignored. At the time, we all remember the touchscreen devices that were popular. They had tiny little UI elements and basically required a stylus to interact with them.

I would make a slight but important modification to your second sentence:

    concluded that interacting with a handheld device's *UI* with a stylus
    sucks on principal.

That still holds. It's not a fair interpretation to think that Jobs considered having an optional stylus a failure.

I agree with respect to Quora in general, but that link summed up my feelings on the subject so I included it instead of writing it out myself.

> The context any statement is made in is very important and can't be ignored

The fact that Jobs said this can't be ignored: he would diss anything Apple did not (yet) have without needing a better reason than making Apple look good. He's the man who said "No one wants 'Hummer' 5-inch phones" (remember when that counted as huge?) and "You will need to file down your fingers to use 7-inch tablets" yet 3.5-inch iPhones could handle full-sized fingers just fine. I still remember the bogus[1] comparison shared by Apple fans that showed 3.5 inches as the perfect size for thumb reachability.

As you know Apple later entered those product categories without Apple adding anything significant to the formula.

1. Bogus because the phone sizes were not to scale. The thumb radius was larger on the smaller iPhone.

Fair point. I also remember Apple saying black and white screens were somehow superior to color. (Could be apocryphal)

FWIW, I use an iPhone SE because I still think the 5" phones are too annoying to use in one hand.

But yes, Apple has done this. I think the stylus thing has been beaten to death already, and I should have known better to be baited into a comment thread that isn't very useful anyway.

And if they don't use it themselves to spam everyone you've ever interacted with through a Google service, they'll have a data breach in the next few years and get their entire DB stolen by someone who will do at least a spam campaign with it.

No, he doesn't get a pass that easily either.

Point to another device that only allows Stylus input or expects it to be the primary input.

There's not. The Surface is a primarily multi-touch device that also allows for Stylus input.

What's good for the goose, good for the gander.

He said that over seven years ago. Two years before the Surface. The tablets at the time definitely did require a little pointy device to access the Start menu and interact with the "Tablet" OSes that were just desktop OSes with a few bolt-ons.

Jobs has form for this kind of thing, too (breaking something to force developer behavior before reintroducing it when habits have changed).

Best example: the original Mac had no cursor keys (to force developers to build mouse-based UIs). Steven Levy writes about it at length in "Insanely Great".

If you make a "pro" device, well, graphics designers require the precision, and they are a big part of pro users. They aren't forcing you to use it, it supports touch too, so the only drawback is increased cost to support the option, really.

It's not a stylus, it's a pencil.

These are speed holes. They make the car go faster.

The point was that a stylus isn't required. It still isn't required.

I think that's spinning the comment as much as the rest of us, just in the opposite direction.

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