More Apple for the day

Fortune magazine has an article by Philip Elmer-DeWitt saying that, last week, Apple filed this year's tenth stylus patent; that makes 32 and counting, so something's in the works.

You can’t write a story about the rumored Apple smart pen, or iPen, as it’s inevitably dubbed, without referring to two of Steve Jobs’ most famous dicta:

“Nobody wants a stylus” (January of 2007)
“If you see a stylus, they blew it.” (April of 2010)

So when an Apple stylus patent gets approved (as one did in April of 2014), or another gets filed (as one did last week, the tenth so far this year), one of these quotes is usually trotted out for ironic effect.
But if you watch the video that started it— the Macworld 2007 keynote where Jobs unveiled the iPhone — you’ll see that what he actually said isn’t what people remember him saying:

How are we going to communicate with this,” he asks rhetorically, referring to the iPhone. “We don’t want to carry around a mouse, right? So what are we going to do? Oh, a stylus, right? We’re going to use a stylus. (Pause) Nooo. (Big laugh) Who wants a stylus? You have to get them and put them away and you lose them. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus.”

Note that Jobs did not say nobody would ever want a stylus. He said nobody wants a stylus as the primary input on a mobile phone. For that, fingers are better.
That there already is a stylus market— albeit a modest one— is evident on Amazon, where you can buy them on sale in packets of three for $6.99.
That Apple has a team of engineers working on building a better one is evident from the collection of more than thirty filings that Patently Apple’s Jack Purcher has helpfully assembled. According to Purcher, the iPen is one of Apple’s longest-running projects, if not the longest. Apple Pay emerged fifty-two months after after its first public filing. Apple Watch is scheduled to ship less than thirty months after it first surfaced. Apple started filing stylus patents, according to Purcher, six or seven years ago, shortly after the iPhone shipped. “Why is Apple spending so much engineering time and money on a project for over six years,” Purcher says, “if there isn’t a real chance of this becoming a real product down the line?”
If there is to be an Apple smart pen, he adds, we’ll probably see it roll out with the rumored iPad Pro. That jumbo-sized tablet, made with design, engineering, and graphics professionals in mind, is now expected in first half of 2015.
“Steve Jobs wasn’t a big fan of the ‘dumb stylus’ of yesteryear that was basically a tiny plastic stick,” Purcher wrote in 2011, when Jobs was still alive. “And so he set out to reinvent it.”
I usually stay away from patent stories because most of what Apple files never ships. But ten patents in one year is too many to ignore. To me, this feels like the watch did last summer. It feels like we’re getting close.

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