In defense of the late resistive touch screen

The iPhone changed everything forever. The stylus was a thing of the past; now, one could simply use their finger without any need for pressure or effort. The capacitive touchscreen was intuitive in ways most people had never even considered. Gone were the days of the missing stylus, the finnicky dance of using your fingernail to poke at miniscule UI elements seemingly designed for office PCs. Unfortunately, this spelled the end for most forms of precise pen input in general. In the past, when you had a device with touch input, it was taken for granted that you could touch a pixel on your display and expect exactly that pixel to light up. You didn't need a fancy active stylus, anything with a soft plastic tip would do fine. Multitouch was unthinkable, but inputs were responsive and did exactly what you told them to, every time. Now, if you need this functionality, your options are expensive proprietary solutions such as Wacom, Apple Pencil, or Samsung S Pen. There are some free solutions such as USI pen input, but between anemic device support and lackluster critic and consumer reviews, citing issues such as poor latency, connectivity issues, and subpar software support, it hardly seems like a legitimate option. Not too long ago, a piece of plastic stowed away in the side of your device was enough. Every application on this sort of device was designed to work perfectly with this interface, and you could always count on it to perform. This post is not meant to disparage capacitive screens; I understand that for the majority of today's applications they are in fact better. But I do believe there is still a place for resistive touch devices in our digital culture.