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.
"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.
Certainly the ipad + pencil are some of the best digital art hardware ever created. I take issue with people implying that other products are irrelevant.
The total number of ipads sold doesn't seem like a good metric since many people won't use them for digital art. Market share among digital artists seems like a better metric. I found this survey: https://www.celsys.com/en/topic/20230120 which shows that 19% of digital artists use an apple pencil. This is the largest single category, but much smaller than the sum of windows PC categories.
