That’s awesome that he a digital tablet enables him to create more art. I met a comic book artist recently who was drawing nonstop even while signing autographs and talking to fans.
…but if you spend any time around artists it’s evident that the iPad/Pencil/Procreate trio is one of the most significant leaps in consumer tech for visual artists of the last decade.
[0] he never said that any and all styluses are bad - he said that 1) cell phones that 2) you can only interact with by using a stylus (not an uncommon paradigm back in 2007) were bad
- hardware quality wise, already the 1st gen Apple Pencil had the specs of the higher end tablets (12-bit pressure sensitivity, orientation, azimuth, all in a sleek package)
- you can use your iPad for a bunch of other stuff too, and it's super portable - whereas for the high end tethered drawing tablets, they're pretty single purpose, and they take up a bunch of space on your desk. This all matters to broke artists living in dorm rooms/tiny apartments.
- the Procreate team designed a tool that was really focused on the digital drawing experience and managed to make a high quality, affordable product out of it. The standard for digital drawing on those tethered tablets is mostly Photoshop, which a) is meant for tons of stuff beyond drawing, making it quite complex and b) has 4 decades of interface cruft piled up at this point.
Honestly yeah, there truly are pre/post iPad+Pencil eras in consumer tech for anyone doing work that involves hand illustration/sketching.
[0] whereas their competitors struggle to sell low numbers of units at terrible margins
I think it's just a question of definition. The Apple pencil was introduced in 2016, since then about 500.000.000 iPads have been sold. If you compare that with the number of Thinkpad yogas or HP elite book 2760ps it's possible to come the conclusion that they are relatively less successful. But of course they can be "absolutely successful" depending on your definition.
The total number of ipads sold doesn't seem like a good metric since many people won't use them for digital art. Market share among digital artists seems like a better metric. I found this survey: https://www.celsys.com/en/topic/20230120 which shows that 19% of digital artists use an apple pencil. This is the largest single category, but much smaller than the sum of windows PC categories.
I’m not much of a digital artist and views in this space probably vary wildly.. but if I steel man the pro iPad case I think it’s a few things 1. Screen quality. iPads look better than cintiq bc the display in the iPad is actually pretty awesome. Like recommended by the color nerds for being the best color you can get for the price, 2. Pen distance on iPad your pen is closer to the actual pixels. The cintiq had more space between the screen and the surface, feels like you draw above the page a little. 3. Biggest of all is portability. Artists love desks but they also love drawing everywhere all the time. iPad is just better at this because it’s designed as a tablet totally. The pre-apple pencil Wacom stuff existed as tablets but from what I remember was mostly just windows laptops. So software wasn’t built for touch and wanted keyboards and stuff. Responsive multitouch and the os(and drawing apps) built to integrate it tightly is a level of polish Wacom couldn’t do as just a pen input system. 4. Cost cintiqs always cost a ton and a lot of them don’t even have the computer part, iPads aren’t cheap but are way more accessible.
Maybe Wacom has caught up with newer offerings? it’s been a while since I looked at their stuff. There are also totally reasons why you’d wanna go that route for some digital pen stuff (eg high end digital sculpture or texture painting type stuff that really needs the power and integration you can get from a desktop and desktop os)