蘋果下一款產品是手寫筆iPen

You can’t write a story about the rumored Apple smart pen — or iPen as it’s inevitably dubbed — without referring to two of Steve Jobs’ most famous dicta:

要寫一篇文章講述傳說中的蘋果（Apple）智能筆——它當然會被戲稱爲iPen，就不能不提喬布斯的兩個著名論斷。

“Nobody wants a stylus” (January 2007)

“沒人想要一支手寫筆。”（2007年１月）

“If you see a stylus, they blew it.” (April 2010)

“如果你看到一支手寫筆，那麼他們一定搞砸了。”（2010年4月）

So when an Apple stylus patent gets approved (as one did in April), or another gets filed (as one did last week, the 10th so far this year), one of these quotes is usually trotted out for ironic effect.

因此，每當蘋果有手寫筆專利獲批（比如今年4月的一項專利）或是申請另一項專利（比如上週這項專利，這也是今年爲止第10件了）時，人們經常會引用喬幫主的這兩句遺訓來烘托諷刺效果。

But if you watch the video that started it — the Macworld 2007 keynote where Jobs unveiled the iPhone — you’ll see that what he actually said isn’t what people remember him saying.

但如果你看看2007年Macworld大會上的主旨演講，也就是喬布斯發佈iPhone那次，你會發現，他親口說出的話，其實和人們印象中的不完全一致。

“How are we going to communicate with this,” he asks rhetorically, referring to the iPhone. “We don’t want to carry around a mouse, right? So what are we going to do? Oh, a stylus, right? We’re going to use a stylus. (Pause) Nooo. (Big laugh) Who wants a stylus? You have to get them and put them away and you lose them. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus.”

他語氣略帶誇張地說：“我們如何和它（指iPhone）互動？我們不想隨身帶着鼠標，對吧？那麼我們怎麼辦呢？噢，手寫筆，對嗎？我們可以用手寫筆。（停頓）不是。（大笑）誰想用手寫筆呢？你得把它們拿出來再放回去，還會弄丟。呸，沒人想用手寫筆。”

Note that Jobs didn’t say nobody would ever want a stylus. He said nobody wants a stylus as the primary input on a mobile phone. For that, fingers are better.

注意，喬布斯並沒有說，永遠都沒有人想用手寫筆。他說的是沒人想在手機上以手寫筆作爲主要輸入方式。對於這項工作來說，手指更加勝任。

That there already is a stylus market — albeit a modest one — is evident on Amazon, where you can buy them on sale in packets of three for $6.99.

從亞馬遜網站就可以看出，手寫筆已經形成了一個市場，雖然規模還不是很龐大。你可以在亞馬遜上花6.99美元買上三個。

That Apple has a team of engineers working on building a better one is evident from the collection of more than 32 filings that Patently Apple’s Jack Purcher has helpfully assembled.

科技博客蘋果專利(Patently Apple)撰稿人傑克o帕徹已經註冊了32個手寫筆專利，這顯然說明蘋果的工程師團隊已經在研究生產一支更好的手寫筆。

According to Purcher, the iPen is one of Apple’s longest-running projects, if not the longest. Apple Pay emerged 52 months after after its first public filing. Apple Watch is scheduled to ship less than 30 months after it first surfaced. Apple started filing stylus patents, according to Purcher, six or seven years ago, shortly after the iPhone shipped.

據帕徹表示，iPen差不多是蘋果耗時最長的項目之一。蘋果支付(Apple Pay)在首次註冊專利後的第52個月就上線了。蘋果手錶(Apple Watch)從首次浮出到出貨不到30個月。然而帕徹表示，蘋果早在六七年前就開始註冊手寫筆的專利，也就是在首款iPhone剛出貨不久的時候。

“Why is Apple spending so much engineering time and money on a project for 6+ years,” Purcher says, “if there isn’t a real chance of this becoming a real product down the line?”

帕徹表示：“如果它沒有機會成爲一個真實產品，蘋果爲什麼要歷時六年多，在這個項目上耗費這麼多工程師的時間和資金？”

If there is to be an Apple smart pen, he adds, we’ll probably see it roll out with the rumored iPad Pro. That jumbo-sized tablet, made with design, engineering and graphics professionals in mind, is now expected in first half of 2015.

他補充道，如果蘋果真的要推出智能手寫筆的話，它最可能與傳說中的iPad Pro一起面世。iPad Pro是一款爲設計、工程和圖像專業人士打造的巨屏平板，有望於2015年上半年問世。

“Steve Jobs wasn’t a big fan of the ‘dumb stylus’ of yesteryear that was basically a tiny plastic stick,” Purcherwrote in 2011, when Jobs was still alive. “And so he set out to reinvent it.”

帕徹曾於2011年寫道：“喬布斯並不喜歡以前那種基本上就是一根塑料棍的‘傻瓜手寫筆’，所以他決定，重新發明手寫筆。”彼時喬布斯仍然在世。

I usually stay away from patent stories because most of what Apple files never ships. But 10 patents in one year is too many to ignore. To me, this feels like the watch did last summer. It feels like we’re getting close.

我通常避免撰寫與專利有關的報道，因爲大多數蘋果註冊的專利從來沒有變成實物。但一年註冊10項專利，實在是一個不容忽視的數字。對我來說，這就像去年夏天的智能手錶一樣，讓人感覺蘋果的智能手寫筆離我們已經不遠了。（財富中文網）