Who wants a stylus. You have to get em and put em away, and you lose em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus. — Steve Jobs

Who wants a stylus. You have to get em and put em away, and you lose em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus.

Author: Steve Jobs

Insight: Most of us think of this as just Steve Jobs being cocky about why the iPhone didn't come with a stylus. But he was actually pointing at something deeper: the friction between us and our tools. Every extra step between you and what you want to do—finding the stylus, remembering where it is, worrying you'll break it—is a small tax on your attention. We don't consciously notice these taxes, but we feel them in our impatience. This still matters because we're drowning in friction we don't even see. We have passwords we can't remember, apps that require three steps to do one thing, notifications that interrupt us constantly. We've gotten used to accepting small annoyances as inevitable. But Jobs was arguing they're not. The best tools don't make you manage them—they disappear into what you're trying to do. Your fingers are always with you. A stylus is another thing to think about. The slightly uncomfortable truth is that we often tolerate bad design because we've stopped expecting better. We think friction is just "how things work." But sometimes the simplest choice—ten fingers instead of a stick—is actually the one that respects your time and your mind.

Source: At Macworld 2007