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The context any statement is made in is very important and can't be ignored. At the time, we all remember the touchscreen devices that were popular. They had ti

The context any statement is made in is very important and can't be ignored. At the time, we all remember the touchscreen devices that were popular. They had tiny little UI elements and basically required a stylus to interact with them. I would make a slight but important modification to your second sentence: concluded that interacting with a handheld device's *UI* with a stylus sucks on principal. That still holds. It's not a fair interpretation to think that Jobs considered having an optional stylus a failure. I agree with respect to Quora in general, but that link summed up my feelings on the subject so I included it instead of writing it out myself.

sangnoir 9y ago
> The context any statement is made in is very important and can't be ignored The fact that Jobs said this can't be ignored: he would diss anything Apple did not (yet) have without needing a better reason than making Apple look good. He's the man who said "No one wants 'Hummer' 5-inch phones" (remember when that counted as huge?) and "You will need to file down your fingers to use 7-inch tablets" yet 3.5-inch iPhones could handle full-sized fingers just fine. I still remember the bogus[1] comparison shared by Apple fans that showed 3.5 inches as the perfect size for thumb reachability. As you know Apple later entered those product categories without Apple adding anything significant to the formula. 1. Bogus because the phone sizes were not to scale. The thumb radius was larger on the smaller iPhone.
- function_seven 9y ago
  Fair point. I also remember Apple saying black and white screens were somehow superior to color. (Could be apocryphal) FWIW, I use an iPhone SE because I still think the 5" phones are too annoying to use in one hand. But yes, Apple has done this. I think the stylus thing has been beaten to death already, and I should have known better to be baited into a comment thread that isn't very useful anyway.

sangnoir 9y ago

> The context any statement is made in is very important and can't be ignored The fact that Jobs said this can't be ignored: he would diss anything Apple did not (yet) have without needing a better reason than making Apple look good. He's the man who said "No one wants 'Hummer' 5-inch phones" (remember when that counted as huge?) and "You will need to file down your fingers to use 7-inch tablets" yet 3.5-inch iPhones could handle full-sized fingers just fine. I still remember the bogus[1] comparison shared by Apple fans that showed 3.5 inches as the perfect size for thumb reachability. As you know Apple later entered those product categories without Apple adding anything significant to the formula. 1. Bogus because the phone sizes were not to scale. The thumb radius was larger on the smaller iPhone.

function_seven 9y ago
Fair point. I also remember Apple saying black and white screens were somehow superior to color. (Could be apocryphal) FWIW, I use an iPhone SE because I still think the 5" phones are too annoying to use in one hand. But yes, Apple has done this. I think the stylus thing has been beaten to death already, and I should have known better to be baited into a comment thread that isn't very useful anyway.