Hard Candy’s iPad Stylus is an odd-duck product. It’s a stylus for a tablet that’s designed to be used with your finger. Like Steve Jobs said, “If you see a stylus, they blew it.”
But it’s actually pretty cool. I’ve got one, and I like it — even if I never use it.
I’m not alone. The Candy Pen iPad Stylus is already on its way to becoming a big hit.
For a product that’s pretty useless, the Stylus is already a hit.
It’s selling 6,000 to 7,000 a week on Amazon, and the holiday season hasn’t even started, according to Hard Candy Cases CEO Tim Hickman.
Hickman says the Stylus is a hit because it isn’t practical. It’s a fashion item. It looks and feels good. If you think it also has to be useful, you’ve blown it.
“We’re a fashion company,” said Hickman. “Like a shoe company making 6-inch-high heels: it doesn’t always make sense. We just went with it. We made it big and shiny because its fashion.”
Hickman’s right. The $34.95 Stylus is a pleasure to touch and hold, even if you don’t always reach for it when you’re using your iPad. It feels good in your pocket, and it has a pen for when you need to jot something on paper.
Hickman predicts the holidays will be even brisker. The Stylus is a good gift for a new iPad owner.
It’s not fair to say the Stylus is completely useless; It is actually pretty good for drawing on the iPad, and there are plenty of drawing apps to use it with.
Hickman said the company originally hoped the Stylus might be good for taking notes on the iPad, but the screen resolution isn’t high enough. They went ahead and made it anyway.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
