
Steve Jobs Describing The Moment He Decided To Do The iPad - justplay
http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-describing-the-moment-he-decided-to-do-the-ipad-2013-5#ixzz2UqfxXRud
======
phaus
>As soon as you have a stylus, you are dead.

This might have been correct at the time Steve Jobs made the statement, but
Apple really needs to reconsider.

Apple has always claimed to make devices for "creative" people, yet pretty
much every artist on the planet wants Apple to release an iPad with a built in
digitizer. Any student that knows what a digitizer is will also be likely to
want one.

There is a huge market right now for stylii for the iPad, yet every single one
of them is absolutely terrible. There are even a few third-party attempts at a
adding a digitizer, and they are just as bad or worse.

Samsung's Note phones and tablets have been selling very well in spite of the
fact that the digitizer's are often slow and buggy due to poor application
support. If a company like Apple decided to give such a product their full
attention, they could make something truly amazing. Perhaps they could even
write their own pressure-sensitive compatible drawing/painting/note-taking
programs to accompany the addition of the technology.

Sadly, there isn't any indication that they are interested in doing this.
Instead, they are developing televisions that most people won't be able to
afford and smart-watches.

~~~
geon
The difference would be that the iOS interface is built for touch, even if
drawing apps would support a stylus.

Microsoft didn't even build their interface for a stylus. It was built for a
mouse, and the stylus was a crutch for making it work on a tablet.

But using a mouse based interface with a stylus is really suboptimal. I had a
Wacom digitizer for drawing, but I would switch to using the mouse as soon as
I needed to interact with the interface, because it was so awkward.

~~~
phaus
I agree, but I wasn't suggesting that they abandon the touch screen, just that
they develop a version of the iPad with a digitizer for people who like to
draw/take notes. These people number in the tens, if not hundreds of millions,
so clearly there's a market for it.

The iPad was created as a content consumption device, but the popularity of
productivity apps seems to indicate that quite a few people are trying to use
them as laptop replacements. My laptop weighs just under 10lbs (I like games)
so it's helpful to have something that gets me 80% of the functionality of an
ultrabook when I don't feel like lugging it around.

I myself have two cases, a normal protective case for when I want to read /
watch movies / play games, and a Clamcase Pro, which basically turns the iPad
into a macbook air clone with a mobile OS. The keyboard is as nice as a real
Apple product, and I can type about 90 WPM on it without any problems. I've
written dozens of term papers and even a bit of code on it. I just wish I
could also use my iPad for drawing/design without it being an absolutely
horrible experience.

~~~
dmpk2k
_These people number in the tens, if not hundreds of millions, so clearly
there's a market for it._

It'd be like a Cintiq, but actually affordable. That, and you can move and
rotate an iPad around almost like a sheet of paper while drawing.

I was genuinely disappointed when I realized that the iPad had zero support
for this. It seemed like quite the oversight.

------
Steko
All great ideas are just that until the technology is ripe. A successful
tablet required, amongst other things:

(1) a high quality screen;

(2) a chipset that could run a full browser and playback high quality
fullscreen videos seamlessly, including over wifi;

(3) some combination of advantages vs laptops (generally mobility, battery
life, price) as a tradeoff for the lack of being a full powered machine.

For #3 you can see something like the phone/touch having laptop like battery
life but pocketability. The ipad, while more mobile than a laptop, was not
dramatically so, and basically had to last through an entire work/school day.
_Had to_.

This is why, more or less, all earlier tablets failed. Because when the iPad
came out, it was already all batteries, and if you had tried to do that at 60
nm that many batteries would give out at 5-6 hours. Adding 30% more batteries
starts to lose your form factor advantages and costs more. In fact, Apple -
with it's vertical design scale from chip to OS - was probably able to squeeze
a viable tablet out a generation earlier than anyone else could have simply
from a battery life standpoint.

Here's video playback over a year after the iPad was released:

<http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4445/38761.png>

The real technology requirements of a new mass consumer device seems like
something we should keep in mind when we think about things like wearables and
when we should expect things like Glass to really be viable.

~~~
marknutter
I disagree that the iPad succeeded because of the 3 reasons you stated above.
Tablets had been around for years and had all of those things. I believe the
focus on usability and the lack of a stylus were what made the iPad (and the
iPhone, for that matter) successful. Microsoft's approach to the tablet was to
bolt on a few tablet specific features to the standard Windows operating
system and focus on a stylus driven experience.

Apple decided to use iOS rather than standard OSX for their tablet which was
built primarily to be a mobile operating system based on multi-touch, not a
stylus. I remember an interview with Steve Balmer laughing about the lack of a
stylus, but it was a genius move on Apple's part. Often with new technology
it's not the hardware capabilities of a device that makes or breaks it but
that crucial moment when the average user picks it up and the experience
either "clicks" with them or not. The iPad experience clicked with people
immediately and that's why it succeeded.

~~~
Steko
"Tablets had been around for years and could do all of those things."

You're mistaken. Those were just laptops that had a $200 feature where you
could hide the keyboard underneath and poke at the screen with a stylus. They
offered nothing over a laptop to 99% of users.

~~~
marknutter
_You_ are mistaken. There were countless tablet pcs on the market that didn't
have physical keyboards. They called them "slate" tablet pcs.

~~~
Steko
And none of them lasted all day or offered the average user much over a
laptop. And they failed miserably at market. The main selling point of the
ipad is certainly not the lack of a keyboard.

I'm not sure what your point is re: windows slates/tablets. They certainly did
not meet the criteria above.

~~~
marknutter
The battery life wasn't great on those slate tablet PCs, I'll admit, but I
also don't think battery life was the main reason the iPad took off. I really
think it was the emphasis on multi-touch interaction over a stylus and the
dedicated OS.

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ctdonath
Remember the _idea_ was a hit back with the Newton. The technology just wasn't
there.

------
kabdib
Microsoft has serially dropped the ball on this. They could have done a good
tablet virtually any time, but the internal politics always got in the way of
the design and engineering. It would have needed to run Windows, for instance,
which would have killed it.

One of the most successful consumer products, the Xbox 360, runs Windows, but
it's got most of the bullshit stripped out (e.g., no registry, no WMI, no
services to go sideways).

Putting full-blown Windows in everything is a huge mistake, and unless a
project can get the political capital to overcome that, it will doom it.

~~~
glenra
Microsoft actually used non-windows OSes for lots of tablet-like devices.
Windows CE was "windows" in name only - IIRC it was a small custom OS they
rebranded from some company they bought, much like what Apple did with the
first iPod OS. PocketPC also was stripped-down, not full-blown Windows.

~~~
kabdib
WinCE is also an architectural train wreck. It is unbelievably bad on the
inside. I have personal experience with its USB stack, which is so full of
layers that we couldn't get more than about 10 mbits/second out of it (on
hardware capable of well over 300 mbits/second).

------
0xshalaby
I really doubt that Steve made ipad as response to Microsoft >"Fuck this,
let’s show him what a tablet can really be." here why
[http://allthingsd.com/video/?video_id=70F7CC1D-FFBF-4BE0-BFF...](http://allthingsd.com/video/?video_id=70F7CC1D-FFBF-4BE0-BFF1-08C300E31E11)
go to 0:37:12 min in this video Steve Jobs tell a secret how he got to build a
tablet by one day he had idea to make screen without keyboard multi-touch.

------
kailuowang
It's also a story about how big ideas does not always start from big vision.
It can start from something much less grand - like simply a revenge or an act
of ego. And then you need other skills to evolve it, it is those evolving that
makes small ideas big and big ideas real grand things. The tablet vision is
from MS, Steve made it iPhone.

~~~
glenra
Saying "the tablet vision is from MS" is a bit of an overstatement. The party
mentioned would have been in 2005. Apple had released the Newton in 1993
(after having worked on it for many years) and refined it over the next 5
years, inspiring a raft of competitors including Palm (whose first product was
software for the Newton) and Microsoft. The Apple MessagePad 2000 (released in
1997) had an entirely tap-based interface with no dedicated hardware buttons -
the whole interface was whatever you saw on the screen. The initial vision for
the Newton was that it would be a tablet OS that could scale to a variety of
sizes - "from a post-it pad to a whiteboard" - the actual sizes released were
driven by market considerations at the time.

So Microsoft's efforts might possibly have given Apple the kick in the pants
it needed to try AGAIN at a tablet OS at that specific time, but the reason
they could do it so quickly and effectively once the decision was made is that
Apple had already iterated through the design issues and had stuff along those
lines already working in the labs.

Also, Jobs's 50th birthday party would have been in 2005, but the "Project
Purple" team that worked in earnest to release iPhone was formed in 2004. And
the iPhone took three years to develop (as dated from the formation of that
team), not 6 months. So I don't think this story really works on any level.
Maybe Steve remembered it wrong - it's more likely he was sitting on the
knowledge of what his team _had already done_ in secret and it was killing him
not to say anything about it, making the moment especially memorable.

~~~
pswenson
read again, it wasn't Jobs' birthday party.

"One of the people who was building Microsoft's tablet was friendly with Jobs'
wife, Laurene Powell. He asked Jobs and Powell to come to his fiftieth
birthday party."

~~~
glenra
Doh! You're right, I misread that part. But I think the rest stands.

------
kunai
It's sad that the taped interviews by Isaacson haven't been released to the
public with the Jobs family's permission.

There's perhaps so much insight, and so much brilliance in those interviews.

------
ghshephard
Anybody from Apple want to comment what really happened? This was at least
six+ years ago, so ideally your NDAs on the actual events have now expired.

~~~
jacquesm
Even if their NDA's have expired their employment may not have and if you
value your employment at apple breaking an NDA, even an expired one may be a
bad idea.

------
chris_wot
I would love to know who the Microsoft employee was...

------
stesch
Is a stylus really that bad?

~~~
6d0debc071
Not for what it's meant for, but how they used it is.

One of the main things you have to remember is that when people try to do
something quickly they have to apply more force to move their limbs, which
requires that you apply more force to stop your limbs as well. And getting
high peak forces in place with just the right timing to stop perfectly on a
specific point in space rapidly becomes more difficult the faster you're
moving.

You can even see it if you look at people learning to draw a gun quickly to
fire it at a target: they'll overshoot their target slightly and then settle
on target. It's one of the reasons for the old saying 'Fast is fine, but
accuracy is everything.'

I've digressed slightly, but the point is that it's the same for everything,
including user interfaces: to do anything quickly people need either a
ridiculously high degree of repetition, large hit boxes, or some sort of
immediate feedback that they use to trigger a response that does something.
(Like, you can type without looking at the keyboard fairly easily, but you
can't type without looking at the keyboard on a tablet as easily - at least
not without really good correction software - because it doesn't give you the
same sort of feedback.)

Related, this is why the better shooter players often turn their mouse
sensitivity way down. It's also why, when you're designing a user interface
for a program you want the most commonly used options against the edge of the
screen - since when someone flicks their mouse there they hit an effectively
infinitely deep hit box. (Unless they're on a multi-monitor setup =p )

Stylus interfaces have pretty much always been designed around using the
stylus to hit small targets - that's one of the reasons why they used it
rather than your finger, so that they didn't have to re-write large portions
of their interfaces. And when you do that you pretty much kill usability
because there's little real tactile feedback to allow you to fine-tune what
you're doing so you have to be looking at the device and taking your care over
where you're placing the stylus. It takes forever.

To an extent, people did try to get around that sort of issue with handwriting
recognition for text input. However, there's also an element of resistance
that you get with pens and an even greater extent with pencils that you don't
get with a stylus, which allows you to be more careless in how you apply
force. Writing on tablets is messy and large, (and the translation of the
writing into text is inexplicably bad.)

It's also worth mentioning that you can hold your arm much more loosely when
you're not holding a stylus. As any half-decent boxer will tell you, tension
makes you slow. So, again, that's an advantage for the no-stylus camp since
you don't have to hold you arm in a particular way to keep the pen in the
right position.

So, yeah. They're not bad, for what they're meant to do - mainly sketching.
But to bypass not having an interface designed for touch, and to bypass having
awful implementations of touch screens, they're the kiss of death. You can
sketch with them, you can take (usually messy) freehand notes. But if you're
going to be operating an interface entirely off them, then that interface is
going to have to be large - and if it's going to be large fingers are better
because you get better (though still not great) tactile feedback and you have
that absence of tension.

And all this is when the stylus is good, mind, and doesn't require you to
click on the icon for a bit to get it to register.

~~~
phaus
The type of stylus I was talking about involves an active digitizer and
pressure sensitivity. You can draw and write pretty much naturally with them.
Your handwriting with a stylus designed for a digitizer should be just as neat
and fluid as your normal handwriting. The pictures you draw can be as rough or
as finished as you want them to be. You are only limited by your own skill.

I agree that they are terrible for navigating an operating system.

------
kmasters
Do the news outlets that that quote Steve Jobs bio incessantly have to pay
Walter Isaacson to do so?

I have read so many print articles on news sites from the book that Im sure I
have read it by now.

I kind of wish media would stop reprinting this stuff over and over. Its not
news.

