You can be on Entrepreneur’s cover!

Steve Jobs Would Not Have Liked the Apple Pencil Back in 2007, he expressed his dislike for styluses.

By Alex Fitzpatrick

entrepreneur daily

This story originally appeared on Fortune Magazine

Apple

Apple on Wednesday announced the Apple Pencil, a $99 stylus that serves as an accessory to the new jumbo-sized iPad Pro.

"It delivers something extraordinary," Apple design guru Jony Ive said in a product announcement video. Apple marketing exec Phil Schiller called the stylus "amazing."

Steve Jobs might have disagreed. Back in 2007, the Apple co-founder made a point of dissing the stylus, then a popular accessory for PDAs, when he unveiled the first iPhone. "Who wants a stylus?" Jobs asked. "You have to get them and put them away and you lose them. Yuck! Nobody wants a stylus." Instead, Jobs said the iPhone would depend on the "best pointing device in the world," the human finger. Apple's mobile devices have all been built solely around gestures made with fingers ever since—until the iPad Pro.

It's worth noting that the iPad Pro is still primarily geared toward navigation via fingers. The Apple Pencil is an accessory that the company says provides pixel-perfect accuracy for artists and designers who might use the tablet as a drawing tool. At 12.9 inches diagonal, the iPad Pro is also significantly larger than that first diminutive iPhone that Jobs thought would work so poorly with a stylus.

Still, the Apple Pencil is likely to enter the pantheon of things Apple did that Steve Jobs was originally vehemently opposed to. Other examples include starting an e-book store (Jobs had previously dismissed the Kindle because "people don't read anymore") and getting people to buy movies for their mobile devices (Jobs doubted anyone wanted to watch films on a tiny screen).

Alex Fitzpatrick is a writer for Fortune.com.

Want to be an Entrepreneur Leadership Network contributor? Apply now to join.

Editor's Pick

Business News

Mark Zuckerberg Told Meta Engineers to 'Figure Out' Snapchat's Privacy Protections: 'We Have No Analytics on Them'

Recently unsealed court documents detail "Project Ghostbusters," Meta's project to work around Snapchat's end-to-end encryption to intercept data.

Business News

Sam Bankman-Fried Sentenced to 25 Years in Prison for Multibillion-Dollar Crypto Fraud

Southern District of New York Judge Lewis Kaplan said that the loss amount to the victims of Bankman-Fried's crimes surpassed $550 million.

Growing a Business

The Brand Whiz Behind Sun Bum Is Famous For Making Boring Products Fun. Then, This One Stumped Him.

Everything Tom Rinks touched turned to gold until he took on a brand launch at Target that fizzled. Then, he found a creepy doll on Ebay, and he saw a way forward.

Thought Leaders

How To Improve Your Soft Skills and Emotional Intelligence in 7 Easy Steps

Using these simple but effective approaches will help a person in their business, life and relationships.