I had a similar thought about the Microsoft manager who just claimed that in 2030 no one will use a mouse and keyboard anymore and people won't want to be "mousing around". If he actually believes that it says a lot about the way he interacts with computers. And how rarely he uses it outside of a quiet office.
That's nothing new: Microsoft still has an institutional obsession with pen-computing (going right back to 1992's "Windows for Pen Computing"); it re-emerges every few years: sometimes it's a major imitative like Windows XP TabletPCs[1], or re-launching OneNote as a "free" Windows feature; or adding "inking" support anywhere it doesn't belong (so if there's one good thing about the invasive MS Copilot awareness campaign: it made me forget about how useless "inking" is and shareholder value pissed away on it.
-----
[1] Speaking from personal experience: I had a Tecra M4 myself, but despite everything: a very high-resolution display, Wacom digitizer and stylus, NVIDIA's best laptop GPU, and the best OS and Office integration yet (the 2005 version of the TabletPC Input Panel in Windows XP is a work of art, honestly) and the launch of a brand new product-line: Office OneNote - but the whole experience was really just still... a noticeable downgrade compared to using a good pen on good lined paper; but especially a significant downgrade from using a mouse and keyboard.
The main reason it was such a disappointment comes down to a small number of intractable problems that probably won't be solved on Windows for a long while still:
1. The time-latency between moving the stylus and the on-screen (hardware scanout sprite!) moving with it.
2. The time-latency between writing with the stylus and the on-screen ink being drawn (which is done in software, through multiple layers of buffers, making it easily 3-5x more laggy than the bufferless hardware cursor sprite.
3. Insufficient display resolution: even with a 125dpi display (compared to the 96dpi most laptops had at the time) of 1400x1050 @ 14 inches, natural handwriting with a pen on paper really needs to be rendered at 300dpi or maybe 600dpi.
4. That awkward gap between the actual LCD display screen and the plastic-y stylus-safe screen covering - this was long before iPad-style laminated displays existed too; which means there's parallax error - making it impossible to take the stylus off the screen and reposition it exactly where you expect: it would always land off-target by 3-5px if you're lucky. This alone kills cursive handwriting because you won't be able to accurately dot-your-Is-and-cross-your-Ts even if you have the best fine motor-control possible.
...and there were other issues too: handwriting recognition remains an evergreen joke going back decades[2]; while my Tecra was better at it than my PocketPC, it was still far short of the MS PDC demos showing a full Letter-sized paper of handwriting transforming into rich-formatted text with zero spelling mistakes. There were plenty of glitches in Windows GDI when you used the screen-rotation feature too (e.g. it disabled double-buffering for most Win32 controls; and everything would awkwardly lock-up for a few seconds after the rotation; iPad OS this surely was not).
(I'm sorry for writing obsessively about this; it's one of my... uh... autistic hangups)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiorZ4yrbtk
-----
Apple gets a lot of things wrong; but when Apple get something right, the world knows. And what Apple got right was their understanding that pen-computing for text input is just plain unworkable; even on the iPad with Apple Pencil, it's clear they only intend it to be used for tasks like art/drawing or for simple shape-like annotations - neither of which require fine application of the stylus point on-screen. Whereas Microsoft just won't let the dream die; and I've no idea why.
Ah, the usual "inking is useless" hyperbolic drivel. Pens worked fine (enough) for me as longtime Wacom EMR user, including for handwriting, e. g. classroom notes, sketching, and the like, especially via dedicated third-party solutions. And, obviously, there's always room for improvement. Just as it's obvious that for that to happen you have to "keep the dream alive".
And Steve "Who needs a stylus" Jobs is, as overrated as he was, a dead businessman, while the stylus is, as underrated a tool, still kicking. Even in the castrated and enshittified pen-computing product line of the company he helped to build.
I do pen computing since it began. Indispensable tool in my fields of work. The most problematic thing? Ultramobile and modular general-purpose computing is an underserved market; penabled UMGPC (or UMPCs) are practically nonexistant. Sad.
