"If you see a stylus, they blew it."
Very few of us really know exactly what Steve Jobs meant by that. This is the guy who asked why the heck you would want to watch video on an iPod screen the year before introducing the iPod that could play video. Clearly, his opinions were neither bulletproof nor set in stone, so let's examine this one up close.
People have been writing things down via pens or carving instruments for a few thousand years. No one utilized another way to record and store information at scale until the advent of printing. Kids in schools still do 95% of their work with pen and paper, and any scientist or mathematician will tell you that they spend lots of time working on paper or white board before formalizing things in TeX. I work at a company whose business is technology, and I *still* find pen and paper to be the most efficient means to record information for a good portion of my day.
Writing with a pen or marker is comfortable and quick, and it frees you to form whatever characters or shapes you need to record. Writing with a pen isn't the best tool for writing a blog post (I'm tapping this one out on my iPad screen), but it's probably the best tool for drawing or diagramming. And what if software can start to smooth out the rough edges of diagramming that I do with a pen? What if software can help me convert my drivel to TeX quicker than writing the code on a keyboard? If someone can make that software for the iPad or the Nexus 7 and sell me a stylus with it, I'll buy it in a heartbeat.
A stylus is not a perfect input device for text. But a keyboard or a touch screen isn't a perfect input device for lots of other things, either, like sound or drawn line, but we still think that computing devices need them. People who write code or blog posts all day seem to think that most people's work is about writing text in blocks. It's not. Should doctors really spend their day jumping between form fields on their iPad chart app, waiting for the virtual keyboard to animate up and down on each one before moving their hand to tap out a word or a sentence? A stylus just might be an awesome input device for a lot of tasks that require short bursts of unstructured written input.
Lose the anti-stylus religion, folks. No one has figured out a single perfect input device for all things, and when someone cracks the challenges of the stylus, it has a great chance to be a powerful input device in its own right.
