“The iPhone might never have existed if Apple co-founder Steve Jobs didn’t ‘hate’ an executive at Microsoft,” Shara Tibken reports for CNET. “Scott Forstall, the former head of Apple’s software business and the man who created iOS for the first iPhone, on Tuesday said Jobs couldn’t stand an executive at Microsoft who talked to him about plans for styluses and tablets.”
“Jobs, who was famously anti-stylus and instead favored using fingers on touchscreens, was annoyed with that Microsoft executive so he and Apple started work on their own tablet, which eventually became the iPad,” Tibken reports. “‘iPhone had a very circuitous route by itself,’ Forstall said Tuesday during an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. ‘We’d been working on a tablet project, which has a really odd beginning. It began because Steve hated this guy at Microsoft.'”
“The panel was one of the first times Forstall has spoken publicly since leaving Apple in October 2012,” Tibken reports. “Forstall’s recount backs up Jobs’ own, given in Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography Steve Jobs. It revealed the tech icon said, “This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, ‘F**k this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Jobs was famously anti-stylus for a device the size of a 3.5-inch iPhone. Not necessarily for larger devices.
As we wrote back in August 2015, two years before Apple Pencil was unveiled:
The stylus will become more important with the “iPad Pro,” with its larger display for enterprise and education. Before anybody goes quoting the guy below, an iPad is not an iPhone:
“Who wants a stylus? You have to get ’em and put ’em away and you lose them. Yuck! Nobody wants a stylus, so let’s not use a stylus.” – Steve Jobs, January 9, 2007
SEE ALSO:
Mainstream media blows it, takes Steve Jobs stylus comment out of context – September 11, 2015
Jony Ive: Apple Pencil is for making marks, the finger is the interface for iOS – November 18, 2015
Jony Ive: The story of the Apple Pencil – November 11, 2015
Steve Jobs’ influence is evident in the new iPad Pro and Apple Pencil – September 14, 2015
