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Comment by theguycalledtom | Hacker News Reader

The market for fingerprint readers for smart phones was almost nothing. Just look at the motorola atrix. Now Apple has added a fingerprint scanner and integrated it purely to make it slightly easier to log into your phone, and the iPhone 5s has sold out.

If Apple added proper pen support with palm rejection software APIs to an iPad, you'll bet that people will still buy iPads. Mums will use pens to annotate their extension plans for their new house, maps to the park for child birthdays. Kids will use the pen to become better illustrators which will help them be better communicators later in life. Uni students will use pens to jot down notes quickly and draw math equations with ease.

The pen on a tablet is not a niche. The Surface Pro is a niche product.

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I had the original Palm Vx. I would never use a stylus because it makes nothing easier, except drawing. The stylus is sort of a gimmick. If you need to get serious work done and you are serious enough to need a stylus, the iPhone and iPad are not for you. As Elton Brown would say 'there is no room in the kitchen for multitaskers.' They do a bad job at many things.

Touch unlock, however, is already in use by someone's grandpa... it's clean, it's easy. It's not multitasking. It's making the current norm safer and faster.

The palm vx, did not have a capacitive touch screen with an interface designed for touch. Adding pen support to the iPad does not affect the interface. I'm not sure how your comment is relevant to the conversation?

Correction: Alton Brown says there is no room in the kitchen for UNItaskers (except fire extinguishers). He's actually a huge fan of multitaskers!

You are correct. Yikes, I got that one wrong.

> makes nothing easier, except drawing

Exactly. Drawing includes illustration and annotation. Two things that make communicating faster and easier. As the old saying goes, a picture paints a thousand words.

>As the old saying goes, a picture paints a thousand words.

Only, as my current saying says, not many users paint any pictures or care to.

Everyone uses a pen.

I wouldn't say adding pen input would make the iPad a multitasking device.

He doesn't mean it in the CS "multitasking" sense.

He means it would try to be two things at the same time (a painting surface and a regular tablet), a "jack of all trades, master of none" thing.

The iPad has already mastered touch tableting. Adding a digitiser does not change that.

s/Elton/Alton

>The market for fingerprint readers for smart phones was almost nothing. Just look at the motorola atrix. Now Apple has added a fingerprint scanner and integrated it purely to make it slightly easier to log into your phone, and the iPhone 5s has sold out.

The iPhone 5, 4s, 4 etc has sold out too, despite not having one. So I'm not sure it's the fingerprint scanner that's the differentiator here.

And the analogy is not apt for other reasons too. Apple didn't put a "fingerprint reader" because there was a market for it. They did it because it enables some things like easy mobile payments and better security.

Whereas with something like a wacom-like tablet capability, there IS a market, but it's tiny. And the technology doesn't offer much outside of that market (designers, painters and painting enthusiasts etc). There will be an improvement for handwritten notes and annotations, but that's not the major selling point of the iPad. If it was, Surface would have faired better too.

Still, they might add it at some point, if a dual-technology screen becomes cheaper and mature.

>The pen on a tablet is not a niche. The Surface Pro is a niche product.

Well, judging by unit sales, it very much is.

> The iPhone 5, 4s, 4 etc has sold out too, despite not having one.

The iPhone 4 added a gyroscope, the 4s added a better microphones and associated audio chipset to improve speech recognition. The iPhone 5 added support for Airdrop. Following your logic then Apple really has no excuse not to add features like a digitiser because they will sell out anyway.

> They did it because it enables some things

Yes, and a pen digitiser and palm rejection enables reliable note taking, annotation and illustration.

> the technology doesn't offer much outside of that market (designers, painters and painting enthusiasts etc) That's like saying that only journalists and novel writers need a keyboard, only photographers need a camera. The success of the iPad over traditional laptops has come from a natural way to interact with things directly like they do in real life. In real life people use pens everyday to jot things down.

> If it was, Surface would have faired better too. What? The Surface does not have a pen. Only the Surface pro which is $400 more expensive than an iPad and doesn't run iOS.

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