As always, Apple didn't wholesale invent a product category, but they made the first product that synthesized all the right tradeoffs in a sufficiently compelling package that enabled them to sell tens/hundreds of millions of units fairly quickly[0].

- hardware quality wise, already the 1st gen Apple Pencil had the specs of the higher end tablets (12-bit pressure sensitivity, orientation, azimuth, all in a sleek package)

- you can use your iPad for a bunch of other stuff too, and it's super portable - whereas for the high end tethered drawing tablets, they're pretty single purpose, and they take up a bunch of space on your desk. This all matters to broke artists living in dorm rooms/tiny apartments.

- the Procreate team designed a tool that was really focused on the digital drawing experience and managed to make a high quality, affordable product out of it. The standard for digital drawing on those tethered tablets is mostly Photoshop, which a) is meant for tons of stuff beyond drawing, making it quite complex and b) has 4 decades of interface cruft piled up at this point.

Honestly yeah, there truly are pre/post iPad+Pencil eras in consumer tech for anyone doing work that involves hand illustration/sketching.

[0] whereas their competitors struggle to sell low numbers of units at terrible margins

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fwipsy 18 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not talking about the Cintiq. Around 2015 I was daily driving an HP elite book 2760p which couldn covert to a tablet and had Wacom EMR tech integrated into the display. It worked fine for drawing and I did a lot of it. Along with Fujitsu and Lenovo they'd been making them since the core 2 duo era at least. When the surface pro came out it was building on these, and then the Apple pencil competed with the surface pro. These products sold then and still sell today. At my current company, the default windows laptop is a Thinkpad yoga with a stylus. I'll take your word for it when you say that the Apple pencil was an improvement and sold better. But Apple didn't invent this. There were absolutely successful products that came before.

	▲	ndr42 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"There were absolutely successful products that came before" I think it's just a question of definition. The Apple pencil was introduced in 2016, since then about 500.000.000 iPads have been sold. If you compare that with the number of Thinkpad yogas or HP elite book 2760ps it's possible to come the conclusion that they are relatively less successful. But of course they can be "absolutely successful" depending on your definition.