Manual Transmission and the iPad Mini

Tom at The Unknown Coast has an interesting take on my automatic-vs.-manual transmission analogy from 2010:

But the European car market demonstrates that the current popularity of automatic cars in the US was not inevitable; or at least, it wasn’t an inevitable consequence of technological progress. It wasn’t something that had to happen given the intrinsic technological properties of automatic cars. Under a different set of cultural and economic circumstances, manual transmission could have remained the dominant technology in the US, despite the availability of automatic cars.

His thinking is that an iPad Mini might push the perception that iPads are peripherals to “real” computers, not the future of real computers. Perhaps another reason Apple might call it not the Mini but the iPad Air.

★ Tuesday, 4 September 2012