What many said was impossible has come to pass.

Apple has announced that they’re making a stylus.

That sound you hear is Steve Jobs rolling over in his grave.

But for as much static as Apple is getting from the commentariat, how could they not?

There are already a lot of aftermarket styli available on the market for tablets, both iPad and others.

And in my corner of the world I’m seeing a huge uptick in demand for precision styli.

The old-school (can you believe I just said “old-school”?) styli with the rubber bumper pad are fine for playing Draw Something (does anyone still play Draw Something!?) but they’re unsatisfactory for things like serious graphics, annotating engineering schematics in the field, and, most importantly, signatures on legal documents.

Many of my customers are already migrating to paperless contracts, securing their customers signatures on documents on the sales team’s iPads.

And many of my customers’ customers, both end users and business accounts are moving to paperless contracts as well.

Enter the precision stylus.

Do you know what many of those aftermarket precision styli retail for?

About a hundred bucks.

In that context the Apple bashing isn’t really justified. And especially considering that Apple is positioning the gazillion-inch screen of the iPad Pro as an industrial solution for graphics intensive industries not having an OEM stylus for the iPad Pro would be just leaving money on the table.

And we all know that Apple doesn’t do that.