by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-08-15 16:30:30+00:00
> I had a similar thought about the Microsoft manager who just claimed that in 2030 no one will use a mouse and keyboard anymore

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.

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[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

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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.