steve jobs was soo off with the stylus being out of fashion. totally wrong... the apple pencil is probably THE only strong differentiators for the ipad.
At the time, you effectively could not buy a touchscreen device without a stylus being required. Nintendo DS, Palm Pilot, Windows tablet, etc., it was a bundled experience.
Letting you use not just one, but multiple, fingers on a touchscreen without the need for a stylus was a sea change.
They were announced (Prada: Dec 2006, iPhone: Jan 2007) and released (Prada: May 2007, iPhone: June 2007) at approximately the same time. Further, I don't think the Prada had multi-touch capabilities, like pinch-to-zoom
Steve Jobs was quite right that a stylus is not great for a small portable device with a touch screen. It's clunky, you can easily misplace the stylus and you can't have multi-touch gestures. There are lots of specialized tasks that are better with a stylus but there are a lot of specialized tasks that are better with a combine harvester.
I have a Galaxy Note and you can pry the stylus from my cold dead hands. I love it. The Apple Pencil feels clunky to me - it's so big you can't comfortably do art with it.
His comments on styluses should be seen in light of the technology of the time (Newton/Maemo/Palm OS/WinCE etc) whose input was stabbing at a resistive screen.
(That's not to repudiate finger input being superior to pen for many interactions but styluses of 2019 use vastly different tech to those of 2007.)
I'd say Steve Jobs' public comments should be seen in light of his main role as a product pitchman. When the 9.7" iPad was the only model available, he criticized the ergonomics of smaller models by Samsung, claiming that "you'd need sand paper to sand down your finger" to use them [0].
Meanwhile, he was overseeing the development of the 7.9 inch iPad Mini, which wouldn't come out until late 2012.
His comments on styluses should be seen in light of the technology of the time
I think his comments are general, not about the technology of the time. He's arguing that direct manipulation is better than not-that. That's been a central tenet of UI-stuff for a very long time.
The statement wasn't who needs a stylus, but "if you see a stylus, they blew it" (they being the designers, and in context meaning: if you see a stylus bundled with a tablet as the primary means of interaction).
He was commenting on past tablets that were meant to be used with a small stylus -- and the interface was totally unfriendly (and sometimes unusable) for hand touch.
