“Who wants a stylus? You have to get them and put them away, you lose them. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus.”

It was 2007 and a still-robust Steve Jobs was explaining why the new iPhone would not come with a stylus, something that was quite common in high-end feature phones in those days –- my Palm Treo had one. He made it very clear that the best pointing devices were the ones we were born with, our fingers. For them, Apple invented multi-touch –- a tactile navigation and manipulation strategy that survives to this day on the iPhone, iPad and myriad other touchscreen devices.

Fast forward to Sept. 9, 2015, and Apple CEO Tim Cook is introducing something more than just a stylus for his new, giant iPad Pro. It’s called the Apple Pencil, and while it doesn’t replace touch, it can certainly do things a mere finger cannot.

How did we get here? Didn’t Jobs lay down the law almost a decade ago? Didn’t he say that if you “see a stylus with an iPad, they blew it?"

Did Apple just blow it? Is this heresy? No, not even close.

Revisionist history

Jobs was a well-known absolutist and revisionist. He would make a pronouncement and seemed to rarely — if ever — take the middle ground. He was quite clear again in 2010 when he was explaining why MacBooks would not follow suit with iPad screens and introduce touch. He noted that the existence of a 9.7-inch touchscreen often led people wonder why Apple didn’t just add touch to its laptops.

“First thing you think of is this [a touchscreen MacBook]. We’ve done tons of user testing on this. Touchscreens do not want to be vertical. It gives great demo, but after a short period of time you start to fatigue and after an extended period of time your arm wants to fall off. It doesn’t work. It’s ergonomically terrible.

Yet, this week I saw an iPad Pro attached to an Apple Smart Keyboard that put the touchscreen tablet vertical. You get a full keyboard, but no mouse because, as Apple told me, the screen is the mouse.

Jobs also famously said the company was not working on an iPhone even though he later revealed that the company started working on an iPad near the turn of the century and quickly switched to a touchscreen iPhone when they realized what they could do with that kind of screen technology.

When Jobs stopped denying and delivered the iPhone, no one was really surprised. Just as when Tim Cook finally produced an Apple Watch, it wasn’t met with shock.

But something about this week’s unveilings, the keyboard and stylus that transform the tablet into a proto-PC, has shaken Jobs acolytes, as if some line has been crossed.

Of course, it hasn’t. Jobs’ denials suited the strategy at that time, but as the world changed around him, Jobs adjusted and either moved forward products that had long been percolating in the lab or, perhaps, launched product programs to meet longterm needs he saw brewing in the near future.

So, then, what was Jobs doing when he said, “Nobody wants a stylus?”

Put simply, Jobs was fibbing. And if you accept that notion, then everything Jobs said the company would never do has to be examined anew.

Sometimes I think Jobs was saying what he thought consumers wanted to hear. Others, it was likely a soundbite crafted to confuse competitors.

There's also the fact that sometimes Steve Jobs would look at the technology necessary to bring, say, a stylus to the iPad experience and deem it insufficient. Back in 2007, touchscreens were pressure sensitive, not capacitive and pens were basically plastic dummies. Modern styluses like the Pencil are stand-alone Bluetooth devices that can actually communicate simultaneously with the screen and the system underneath it. Perhaps if this existed in 2007, Jobs might have said something different about the stylus, something like, “Yes, you can use a stylus, if you really, really have to, and we have an optional one for you…”

A new voice

Unlike Jobs, Cook tends to avoid those kinds of polarizing answers and “we will” or “we won’t” until he takes the WWDC or a product unveiling stage, where every announcement is mapped out and words are inevitably followed by deeds. He does not go for the Steve Jobs head fake. It’s just not his style.

Cook is canny enough to know that for everything that Steve Jobs said in his lifetime about Apple products and services, his words are not a roadmap or script. It’s why Cook has always said he would carry on the corporate ethos that Jobs put in place, but always felt empowered to drive the company toward the products and services that best reflect current strategic goals and not ones set forth by a leader who died almost four years ago.

Looked at this way, the iPad Pro, Smart Keyboard and the Apple Pencil make perfect sense. The company needs a product that can satisfy the needs of a mobile workforce that has been toting iPads from home to work. They need a product that can be as productive as a PC, but as easy to use as a tablet. Microsoft already woke up to this fact and built the Surface Pro, a product that, for years, they could not get their OEM partners to build for them. Apple laid the groundwork for the iPad Pro, keyboard and Pencil over the past two years when it launched a partnership with IBM to create apps for vertical industries. Those customers needed a product that is more than just an iPad.

Apple did what it had to. Steve Jobs pronouncements — serious or not –- be damned, and I’m pretty sure Jobs wouldn’t have it any other way. In fact, he’d likely applaud Apple’s new product lineup.

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