KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is usually dead right with his predictions on upcoming Apple products. But lately, his predictions have been whoppers. First, Kuo predicted that Apple would ditch Intel chips in the Mac for ARM by 2016, and now, he’s predicting that the upcoming 12.9-inch iPad Pro will be the first to ship with a stylus. If true, Steve Jobs might just roll over in his grave.
Here’s the nut of Kuo’s logic. With its bigger screen, the iPad Pro isn’t going to be for casual users, who will likely stay with the iPad Air and iPad mini. Instead, artistic types and creatives will gravitate towards the iPad Pro. To appeal to these users even more, Kuo says, Apple will integrate a stylus into the iPad Pro in a more full-featured way than aftermarket solutions like the Cosmonaut. But this stylus will still be optional.
We don’t think all users will need a stylus initially. Coupled with its unfavorable cost structure, high selling prices may turn consumers off if the 12.9-inch iPad is always bundled with it. We therefore expect the stylus to be an optional accessory before sufficient user feedback is received.
Otherwise, Kuo isn’t predicting anything major for the new iPad Pro. He says it will otherwise be largely the same as current iPads, but future models could support something called “3D handwriting” to allow users to write on their iPad Pros just by waving the stylus in the air. He predicts that the iPad Pro will go on sale roughly in the second or third quarter of this year.
If this is true, it certainly flies in the face of what Steve Jobs would have wanted, who famously said that if you see a stylus on a tablet, “they blew it.” Then again, Steve often contradicted himself when it was convenient: this is, after all, the guy who once told reporters that the iPod would never do video.
Via: Macrumors
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
35 responses to “Steve Jobs rolls over in his grave: iPad Pro could have a stylus”
Looks more like a knife to scratch up your iPad.
Steve rolling over in his grave is just a rumor.
Did Steve get buried or cremated? if he got buried, then the statement is probably more true, but I highly doubt dead people’s bodies actually roll in their grave, they typically don’t move. I think it’s more of a figure of speech than a fact. :-)
Steve was a late-life Jew. So he went into the ring of fire.
This just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what Steve Jobs meant. He was saying you shouldn’t *need* a stylus to operate it (as the ‘smart’ phones of the time did), you should be able to use the tablet without needing any accessories – which you’ll still be able to do.
If adding a stylus makes sense to *add* to the functionality, then of course Steve Jobs would be behind it. Besides, you can buy various qualities of stylus at a range of cost points, it’s not like they haven’t existed before now and been used by artists for drawing.
Exactly.
This is bringing something useful for the device owner rather than a sticking plaster to inaccurate resistive touch screens of the past usable (pretty much all mainstream touch devices are now the more accurate/flexible capacitive touch).
Same argument applies to a guy at work who (mis)quoted Steve Jobs in the same way to look down on the Sammy Note 10.1 – sure it’s got it’s problems, but the fact it includes a pressure sensitive stylus for drawing/writing isn’t one of them (other than it adding to the cost).
It’s like having a proper Wacom tablet on a mobile tablet – if the iPad had offered this when I bought the Note 10.1, I would have bought an iPad at the time!
(at the time, the Note series was the only credible lineup with a pressure-sensitive stylus!))
if the iPad Pro has a card reader slot as well as a pressure-sensitive stylus, then it’s a shoe-in for photographers, artists and people who just like to sketch things/easily edit photos (Adobe PS-Touch sales would go up a lot too I’m betting).
I’m expecting a touch version of the Macbook air, taking a bit of inspiration from the M$ surface, probably with the same price point as the Surface Pro.
(I think 2015 is going to be another heady round of convergent [feature] design Note10.1+ChromeOS+Win10+Hex3YuFu +MacbookAir+Surface+iPadPro= some great kit coming out, with decent choice of platform)
This actually sounds reasonable. Jobs wasn’t against the stylus, he just didn’t find it necessary. However, for a tablet this size it seems like users are more likely going to want to use a stylus (it would be perfect for iPhone/iPad artists), even the applications noted above make perfect sense for use with a stylus, especially considering how popular the current iPad is already in those areas.
As an artist who’s used 3rd party styluses with unsatisfactory results, I think this is a great move. An Apple stylus created with the express purpose of working seamlessly on an iPad, would be a welcome addition to an area where 3rd party companies have fallen short.
“Who wants a stylus? You have to get them and put them away, and you lose them… Yuck! Nobody wants a stylus.”, Steve Jobs, 2007
There’s a stark difference from “having to”, and “can”.
Steve Jobs had a lot of ideals, but he could be convinced that his ideals weren’t perfect. I don’t think the ideals of Steve Jobs will define the future of Apple.
He also said that 3.5″ was the perfect size for a phone and in many ways it still is, but we’re willing to sacrifice ease of use for a larger screen. Apple needs to go to where the market is and that’s what they’re doing.
Jobs would say that Apple needs to drive where the market goes,through its innovation (“people don’t know what they want until you give it to them”). If you’re going where the market is, you’re by definition always lagging behind someone else. I think having a stylus for 95% of consumers is a horrible idea. The other 5% (artists, designers, etc.) can buy a third-party one.
It doesn’t matter what Jobs would say. He’s no longer around to say it, he was often wrong and the world isn’t binary.
You can’t just add a stylus to an iPad and have it work well. The point of a stylus is to be very precise, such as for writing and drawing, not just to have something in your hand. And the iPad’s touch screen isn’t that precise, since it’s designed for detecting finger touches. So a stylus on a current iPad is just like a finger, only a finger that you hold like a pen. That’s why you can’t be pixel accurate with the third party stylii – the screen doesn’t detect finger position with that accuracy because it’s not needed for touch controls.
So if Apple adds a stylus to a new iPad, that means they’ll be changing the screen to detect the stylus so that it works better than a finger. And that makes it more interesting than just an Apple-branded stylus.
As if a 12.9 inch iPad wasn’t a terrible idea already.
On the other hand I wouldn’t mind a 15 inch MacBook Air.
It’s called the MacBook Pro.
I actually did change my Air for a 15 Pro. It’s a lot heavier and chunkier. I wouldn’t say it’s a 15 inch Air.
15″ isn’t really an ultraportable anyway.
It doesn’t have to be!
I’d like an Apple touch screen tablet that runs OS X, then the stylus and mouse would work well. Imagine a MacBook Air with a touch screen with full stylus pressure sensitivity but in Tablet form. I bet Apple could come up with a better stand than the surface kick stand too.
That’s a terrible idea and you don’t really want that. What you actually want is a more capable iPad that gives you access to the file system, true multitasking, split screen view, with a keyboard and trackpad.
What if the new “port-less” MacBook Air is actually the MacBook Pro? I know, it’s a crazy thought, but if any of this is true, we’ll be heading down the road of Frankenstein machines.
And a redesigned iOS operating system that doesn’t keep everything in RAM leading to poor and crippling performance when apps and future iOS versions become more bloated.
And a redesigned iOS operating system that doesn’t keep everything in RAM leading to poor and crippling performance when apps and future iOS versions become more demanding and bloated.
“Steve Jobs rolls over in his grave: the iPad Pro could have a stylus”
This is just never going to end on Cult of Mac, is it, this constant, pointless conjecture of what our departed friend (and to many of, us a hero), would say think and say about current and future Apple design? It’s at best a shameless attempt at taps and clicks, and at worst shows that Cult has no faith whatsoever in the people Steve chose to carry Apple forward.
Steve is gone. He is missed. He was brilliant. He was the father (along with Woz) of all that Apple was, became, and in large part is. But Steve is gone! Things must always change, and doubtless Steve Jobs would be among the first to move forward and not look back. If you respected Jobs, please stop overlaying your opinion on what he might have thought.
He already mentioned when the iPhone and iPad came out that he wanted to do away with the stylus. So, this is a past statement Steve did make. Oh, and Steve, as great as he was, was not always right. No one is always right.
Don’t think I ever said Jobs was right all the time. Nope, didn’t say one word about that. What he •did• do was have a lot of successes, and of course some failures, because he moved forward with purpose and design bravery, always taking chances. That’s what often leads to greatness and success.
If you read my post, it wasn’t about a stylus for an iPad (just a wild rumor anyway), or any specific design decision. My sole point is that it’s time to quit conjecturing about what the man would have liked or not liked. I never hear anyone say Henry Ford wouldn’t have approved of changes to the cars that bear his name. No one says, “Thomas Edison would be rolling in his grave about the replacement of wax rolls by records, CDs or digital files.” People don’t even comment on what Bill Gates would like or not like about constant changes to Windows, and •there’s• some fertile ground for criticism!
One of the world’s great inventors and entrepreneurs has passed on (more than three years ago!), and I just think •we• need to move on and let him rest in peace. He did more than enough for us.
I don’t get it. Didn’t Steve Jobs ever change his mind on things over time? I find it hard to believe he didn’t think some things over and eventually change his mind about them. I thought a number of times he said things just to throw competitors off-track. With technology changing all the time Steve would have become a dinosaur if he wasn’t able to adjust his reasoning. He would have had to answer to a board of directors and maybe they would have kicked him out again. As far as a stylus goes, there must be some people who like to use them and I see no reason to completely ignore a segment. I don’t think I’d need a stylus but since I’ve never used one maybe there would be some advantage I’m unaware of. I’m sure all this stuff is just pure speculation and will probably amount to nothing.
Exactly, the guy was a man and like most men he said stuff like, “She’s not my daughter.” “3.5 inches is all you need” Okay maybe not the latter, but you get what I mean. :D
Here’s my take on Stylus pens. People that do graphics, architecture and things like that might benefit from a stylus, but not everyone likes them. I personally hate using them. With that said, Wacom has been selling stylus pens for quite some time, but I would say that only a small percentage of people buy them and actually use them on a regular basis to justify the purchase. If I bought a iPad Pro and it came with a stylus, I probably would play around with it long enough to realize that i probably don’t need one. They will probably have it slide into the case rather than attach to the outside is my guess.
Apple has some really screwed up priorities with the iPad. Two critical things are affecting the iPad that Apple continues to refuse to properly address.
1-Who is going to continue buying iPads when the software is so bug ridden? For example, the browsing experience on the iPad is God awful. Slow, pages always reloading, crashes, working in text boxes (select/cut/copy/paste/scrolling in,etc) in many forums broken in so many ways that it is painful, and sometimes impossible, to try and write a reply, etc, etc.
2-Who is going to continue buying iPads that are often crippled after even just one or two iOS updates? I have an iPad 4, a two year old iPad, that is now painful to use. I even returned a new iPad Air 2 because from what I can see Apple will do the same thing to it. They have been doing that since the first iPad, that was rendered almost useless after iOS 5.
Considering that, who in their right mind would buy a so-called iPad Pro?? The idea is laughable, and that’s coming from someone that used to be a huge Apple fan.
How much is this guy paying you as his publicist, Mr Brownlee? You’re the only person who believes his predictions are more than average at best.
if you want a stylus just do yourself a favour and get a Surface Pro 3 – spanks the ipad on every level. Also, I find it very unlikely moving to 100% ARM by next year will be a thing – as an option. Windows has to go in this route too, hence Windows RT, and getting Windows Phone to run the same kernel as Windows. The question is, who will announce it first, and who will be using the photocopier ;)
I call B.S. on this one. Why would Apple all of the sudden release a product to specifically target “creative types” of people? There’s not a big enough market for creative types and this type of product would be a total failure. I love the idea of a 12.9 inch iPad. I just don’t see a stylus being part of the package or something that would be used to differentiate it in the market.
It’s likely to be an addon/accessory – probably with a hardware spec available so 3rd parties can license it and create variants. Apple’s had a lot of success with accessories using the licensing model over the last 10 years.
‘Steve Jobs might just roll over in his grave’ – it’s really against the philosophy of the company, but if Apple will make it special and useful, then why not?