The Galaxy S27 Pro will be the final nail in the S Pen's coffin

How the hell is Samsung’s S Pen stylus still a thing in 2026? Smartphone manufacturers have shown themselves over the years to be incredibly eager to get rid of any component that even remotely complicates handset design — not even the eminently useful headphone jack could hold on — and yet Samsung’s comparatively gigantic stylus has somehow persisted.

Today, new rumors suggest that Samsung could finally be planning to expand its flagship lineup next year with an S27 “Pro” model, one that would largely be the same as the Galaxy S27 Ultra, but drop the Ultra’s S Pen support. If Samsung really does deliver this option, it might as well declare the S Pen dead for good.

For as great as the S Pen can be, it’s also totally unnecessary

I was an early fan of the S Pen with the original Galaxy Note back in the long, long ago, and stuck with it up through the Galaxy Note 20. Early on, I really liked it; I was a slow convert to the everything-touchscreen world that smartphones were pushing, and a stylus was a nice pair of training wheels, helping me feel like I was retaining some precision in much the same way I might look for an early phone with a hardware QWERTY keyboard.

Even as touchscreen input got a lot better, I still found myself enjoying the S Pen’s versatility, especially as Samsung outfitted it with more and more features in future generations. Air gestures were fun, but as I look back on them now, it all feels a bit gimmicky. Sure, there’s some magic to gesturing around with an electronic toothpick, but at the end of the day, I really wasn’t getting anything done faster, or doing things I couldn’t accomplish easily enough through plain-old touch input.

Despite all that, I was still an S Pen fan. For Samsung’s phones, at least, the S Pen was just one component in a larger conversation: Do I want a Galaxy S, or do I want a Galaxy Note? And later: Do I want an Ultra model? You could argue that the presence of the S Pen may have been a driving force behind the creation of these alternatives, but they also offered a lot of upgrades beyond just this native stylus support. And that made these decisions a lot easier when you were saying “yes” to this whole bundle of top-shelf phone features, all at once.

The worst thing Samsung can do for the S Pen is singling it out

On face value, more consumer choice sounds like a good thing. The source behind this Galaxy S27 Pro report describes the phone as an option that retains the majority of S27 Ultra upgrades, with the specific omission of S Pen support. And if anyone at Samsung cares about the S Pen surviving for another generation, I really hope this isn’t true, because the arrival of the S27 Pro is just going to utterly decimate the S27 Ultra’s sales potential.

As I’ve tried to establish: I like the S Pen. Everything else being equal, I’d love to have one. But the problem is that things aren’t equal, and an S Pen demands sacrifice. We need room to store the stylus. We need a system to charge it (well, if Bluetooth connectivity ever comes back). We need to build a digitizer panel into the screen.

All of that has a cost, whether direct, or because it means making sacrifices elsewhere. But when these trade-offs are all just part of a larger package — deciding whether you want all the perks of an Ultra model — they’re much, much easier to accept. Psychologically, we’re suckers for that “having it all” luxury upgrade; The Korea Herald reported that Ultra models accounted for a full 70% of all Galaxy S26 pre-orders in South Korea.

But what happens when we can have almost all those upgrades — except maybe not this one, kinda awkward, kinda archaic, kinda bulky holdover from Samsung’s smartphone past? Call me a pessimist, but I foresee the vast majority of would-be Ultra shoppers electing to choose the Pro, instead.

I’m hesitant to even speculate about how Samsung might approach pricing, but just thinking about the possibilities is enough to make me nervous. No matter how small the differential between the Pro and Ultra models ends up being, that’s going to be seen 100% as an “S Pen tax.”

Maybe best case, that’s as low as a $50 premium (although I’d bet closer to $100), but that will be sufficient to invite some very uncomfortable questions, prompting even S Pen aficionados like me to actually account for what kind of utility we honestly get out of it. At some point, a whole lot of shoppers who might have bought an Ultra in years past are going to see the Pro as the smarter option, letting them get 99% of what they wanted for less money. And god forbid Samsung has to hike prices and the S27 Ultra starts north of $1,299.99, making the Pro even more attractive.

All this is assuming that the Ultra and Pro are relatively even matches, S Pen support notwithstanding. If Samsung is able to use the S Pen’s absence to squeeze any upgrades into the Pro model — maybe it affords room for a bigger battery — that’s only going to give this new option an even better shot to steal sales away from the Ultra.

Admittedly, the S Pen has become more than just a tiny stylus we can tuck away in our Galaxy phone, and no matter what happens with the S27 series, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see it live on with Samsung’s tablet lineup. But the S Pen’s home on phones has felt increasingly shaky in recent years, and I worry that Samsung creating a narrowly defined model whose value-add is singularly “our best phone, but also with an S Pen” is just begging shoppers to save a few bucks and go with the Pro. If that happens, I don’t know that we’ll see any S Pen at all for the Galaxy S28.