Steve Jobs Mocked the Stylus in 2007, and Apple’s Most Expensive iPhone Just Brought It Back

Buried in the iPhone Duo announcement, under the folding screen and the Rs 2,99,900 price tag, was one line that made me sit up. The tech giant also said that later this year, the Duo will support the Apple Pencil.

An iPhone that works with a stylus. Let that sink in for a second, because there was a time Apple would have found the idea genuinely offensive if this was 2007. While this is a necessary addition to the use case for the iPhone Duo, it's funny that it contradicts with what the legendary Steve Jobs said at the first iPhone launch.

The Stylus That Apple Mocked — iPhone Duo Just Made It a Selling Point

Photo Credit: Apple

What Jobs actually said

Rewind to 2007, Steve Jobs is on stage unveiling the first iPhone, and he takes a swipe at every stylus-toting smartphone of the era. "Who wants a stylus?" he asks. You get them, you put them away, you lose them. Nobody wants a stylus. We are born with ten of the best pointing devices in the world, he says, holding up his fingers.

It was a mic-drop moment, and for navigating a phone he was completely right. Touch won. The stylus-and-resistive-screen phones of the mid-2000s look prehistoric now.

But notice what he was actually attacking. He was mocking a stylus you needed just to operate the thing, because the screens of that era were too clumsy for fingers. That is a different argument from the one the Apple Pencil settles.

The part Indian buyers will find funny

While Apple spent years insisting fingers were enough, Samsung built an empire on the opposite bet. The Galaxy Note and its S Pen were enormous in India, precisely because a stylus is useful when your phone doubles as a work device.

Think about what the S Pen got used for here. Jotting notes in a language your keyboard fights you on, marking up a PDF a client sent, signing a document, sketching a rangoli pattern or a wiring diagram on the spot. For a country where the phone is often the only computer someone owns, a pen was never a gimmick. It was a second input method for people who do real work on a small screen.

Apple is arriving at that realisation in 2026 while Samsung got there in 2011.

Why this is not the U-turn it looks like

Here is the thing, though. I do not think Jobs would be spinning in his grave over this, and not because I am going soft on Apple.

His objection was to a stylus as the primary way to use a phone. On the iPhone Duo, your fingers still do everything they always did — unlock, scroll, type, tap. The Pencil only steps in for the things fingers are genuinely bad at, drawing a straight line, writing by hand, editing a photo with precision on that big inner display.

That is a stylus as a specialist tool, not a crutch. It is the same logic that made the Apple Pencil work on the iPad Pro, where nobody complains that Apple betrayed its principles. Jobs killed the Newton and its pen in 1998, then his own company reintroduced pen input on the iPad in 2015 and the world decided that was fine.

The quiet strategic reason it matters

Pencil support does one more thing that has nothing to do with nostalgia. It locks the Duo deeper into Apple's ecosystem.

A lot of the people who can stomach a Rs 3 lakh phone already own an iPad and an Apple Pencil. The moment that Pencil works with their phone too, the phone stops being a standalone gadget and becomes another node in a setup they have already paid thousands for. That is how Apple keeps you, one accessory at a time.

The folding screen gives you a bigger canvas and the Pencil gives you a reason to actually use it. And somewhere, I suspect, Steve Jobs would grudgingly approve of the distinction, even if he would never have admitted it out loud.