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Comment by twiceaday | Hacker News Reader

If you think a feature is a terrible idea then you shouldn't offer it. And if the technology or context changes sufficiently for you to change your mind then you should start offering it. This is just good product design. But I guess if you word it that way then you cant heavily imply that Jobs was a liar.

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I didn't post that to suggest that Apple is right or wrong.

There are all sorts of reasons not to offer a particular feature or product at time X, and then subsequently offer what appears to be that exact thing at time Y.

Not to mention that the feature or product at time Y might be significantly different or better than the compromise you might have cobbled together at time X.

The comment simply refers to the black-and-white way in which Steve used to frame these things. IIRC, he said many of the same things about Intel chips, keyboard shortcuts, expandable RAM, and so forth.

Case in point, self-driving cars. No one's offering that right now, because they all believe it sucks (at this point). But that doesn't mean that when they do offer it that it will be a bad idea.

> The comment simply refers to the black-and-white way in which Steve used to frame these things.

Except the Jobs' quote you replied to succinctly explains why a stylus is a bad idea as the primary input method on a small pocket device.

A stylus is a bad idea as the primary input method on a small pocket device.

A 12.9 inch iPad Pro is not a "small pocket device".

It's also still absolutely not the primary input method of the device, even on the iPad Pro.

The Surface Pro has been doing stylus input right, in combination with capacitive multi-touch, for 3 years. The problem with the "we don't want to do that, it's terrible ... let's do that, we figured out how to do it right" turnaround is that there's a period in the middle where there's an unreasonable almost religious resistance to doing that thing. Which just keeps progress in check. For example, the iPad mini, which pretty much waited until Jobs was in the ground before it could get on the market, due to his resistance to the idea. And perhaps also the stylus (by which I mean a pressure sensitive, high-precision stylus, not just a capacitive wand) which might have been on the iPad years ago were it not for that resistance.

The issues is more... 'he was for it, before he was against it'...

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