14 DAY TRIAL // In one of many stories excerpted from the Steve Jobs biography now selling like hot cake worldwide, author Walter Isaacson recounts how Apple’s former CEO met up with a Microsoft employee and got so fed up of listening to tablet stories that he decided to make one out of spite.
Surely this isn’t the only reason why the visionary had gathered a team of engineers to build a tablet PC, but Isaacson says it’s one of the key occurrences that led to the creation of the elusive Apple iPad.
So here’s Jobs’ recounting of the scene in question, per the book:
“This guy badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and Apple ought to license his Microsoft software. But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as your have a stylus, you’re dead. 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*** it, let’s show him what a tablet can really be.”
According to Isaacson, Jobs went into the office the next day, assembled a team of technicians and said, “I want to make a tablet, and it can’t have a keyboard or a stylus.”
You may be wondering why Jobs hated the stylus so much. It wasn’t so much that he hated the idea of this type of input - after all, it proved to be practical for some time - but that his vision was about commanding the software directly with your hands.
Jobs explained this during a keynote address in 2007 when the tech genius unveiled his company’s first iPhone. At the time, Jobs specifically emphasized that by getting the stylus out of the way, you could conquer new ground in software and graphics.