When the first iPhone was unveiled in 2007, it came at a time when personal digital assistants (PDAs) were still around in the tech world — along with their stylus accessory.

Late Apple patriarch Steve Jobs said at the unveiling, "Who wants a stylus? You have to get them and put them away, and you lose them. Yuck! Nobody wants a stylus."

After that point, the mobile world came to be dominated by finger-guided smartphones.

When the iPad was released in April 2010, Jobs was even more direct, saying, "If you see a stylus, they blew it."

Fast-forward to Apple's most recent product unveiling, where, in conjunction with the new 12.9-inch iPad Pro's release, a $99 Apple Pencil was made public. Don't be fooled by the name, though — it's a stylus.

The Pencil isn't quite making its way to all Apple devices yet, as it will only be available as a Bluetooth-connected device for use on the iPad Pro. You probably won't have to ever worry about buying one for your iPhone, and it's not like the iPad will suddenly become like an old stylus-centric Palm Pilot.

However, the Apple Pencil and the iPad Pro are indicative of several important things inside Apple and in the broader tech world.

In a continuing trend, Apple will not be bound by the past statements or desires of Jobs under CEO Tim Cook. Of course, the general vision of the company and its signature products have Jobs' fingerprints all over them, but Cook isn't one to do or not do something simply because Jobs would have wanted it that way.

Lance Ulanoff of Mashable wrote after the Pencil unveiling, "Cook is canny enough to know that for everything that Steve Jobs said in his lifetime about Apple products and services, his words are not a roadmap or script."

Apple is also following trends in the larger tablet world by offering a stylus. Microsoft's Surface Pro tablet, which offers a full version of Windows 10, comes with a stylus, as do any number of larger Android tablets or phablets.

If you're a regular user of mobile devices, you might be seriously wondering why styli are making an apparent comeback. After all, there were genuine reasons they went away and why Jobs abhorred them. They became extremely inefficient when compared to simply using your finger.

But with tablets now featuring much increased processing power since the days of even the iPad's first-generation debut, a pressure-sensitive stylus like the Apple Pencil can be a powerful tool for graphic design and art. Note-taking and marking up important digital documents are also core utilities for styli.

The comparison between Microsoft's aforementioned Surface Pro line and the iPad Pro is probably the most surprising thing to note about the Cupertino, California, company's recent product launch.

For years, the iPad has been seen — and marketed — by Apple as the quintessential high-end tablet, and not anything especially smaller or larger. While there is an iPad mini model, it compares favorably to the largest model of Amazon's Kindle Fire HD and Google's Nexus tablets.

No iPad model until now claimed to be anything like the Surface Pro, which Microsoft has advertised as a tablet you can use as a laptop when attaching an optional keyboard. Now, the iPad Pro also offers a keyboard, and is nearly an inch bigger than the Surface Pro.

Apple has long been known for going its own way with its signature products, especially with regard to Microsoft. This marks something of a reversal of that behavior.

It's not too hard to see why Apple is going in this direction when looking at the sales figures. Surface tablet revenue skyrocketed 117 percent year-on-year, according to data from July. Next month, the Surface Pro 4 is expected to launch, and the iPad Pro will be its chief competitor.

The embrace of a stylus and a larger, laptop-like tablet are not typically what Apple does. But, as we've seen under Cook, the current Apple is constantly evolving.