There's a famous quote from Steve Jobs: "If you see a stylus, they blew it." Now there's the just-introduced Apple Pencil for iPad Pro. Jobs may not have liked the stylus, but Microsoft's Bill Gates knew the iPad Pro with its Pencil was inevitable.
Back in 2001, Medium reporter Steven Levy says Gates told him that, eventually, all laptops would be tablets. Gates' Microsoft Tablet tanked when it was introduced in 2002 (with a stylus), but the iPad was a hit when it came out in 2010. It was no laptop replacement though. It was basically for media and communications, not for business.
Now, Microsoft is seeing success with its Surface tablets. Much of that is in the business sector, and Apple seems to be playing catch-up with the new iPad Pro. Like the Surface, it has a keyboard (though that's not included in the iPad Pro's hefty price - it's another $169) and a stylus, um, we mean Pencil (which is also sold separately for $100). And Apple even had a Microsoft executive come on stage to demo Office for iPad.
It seems Gates was better at predicting the future than Jobs was, in this case. With the iPad Pro, Apple has conceded that tablets should be more like laptops, rather than their own separate category.
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