Styluses, once the bane of late Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs’s existence, could soon be coming along to save the day for the iPad is a recent patent is any indicator.
A new patent for a “communicating stylus” shows Apple is apparently serious about building their own stylus for mobile devices just a month removed from a likely related patent {link no longer active} for a “touch input device configured to synchronize a stylus acquisition process with both a touch data acquisition process and a display refresh process”.
The news is just yet another marked departure from the ship Jobs ran for current CEO Tim Cook, as Jobs famously announced that “nobody wants a stylus” while launching the iPhone at Macworld in 2007.
Apple’s apparent willingness to embrace a peripheral they’d once avoided could be tied to a push for iPads in business environments. A partnership with IBM hasn’t done enough to revive stagnant sales on its own, perhaps compelling the tech giant to listen more closely to the concerns of business professionals seeking a more “eloquent” means to create documents on their iPads.
Of course, it’s also possible that Apple’s latest patent filing is just a red herring. Apple is notorious for filing large numbers of patents for gadgets and functionalities that never see the light of day. Still, with their newfound embrace of social media well in hand, it is not unreasonable to think Tim Cook’s Apple might be more flexible to market demand than in years past, even if that “flexibility” means creating a stylus.
