[Prestidigitweeze]

A prediction about there not being a 7" iPad 3 is different from actual knowledge there won't be such an object. Personally, I'm hoping there won't be, but I'd rather not dote on premature pronouncements manipulated by attention-dependent reporters.

A bit annoying to see a discussion about the popularity of tablet sizes focus on Apple's history of dominance alone. Apart from Apple's current success, I see the company as being relevant only in terms of its ability to affect other companies. As long as we have (what for some of us are better) choices, we're not fenced in.

So far, the one way I could see a 7" iPad's being pertinent to this discussion would be this: The annoying phenomenon of creative limitations imposed due to the illusion of their relevance to financial success, which some people might call aesthetic standardization.

If Apple continues to enjoy a market share advantage over other tablet makers, and a global imitation-fest continues to be imposed by boardrooms everywhere on otherwise creative R&D and industrial designers, then whatever reductive design/functionality was built into Apple's 7" would freeze product design elsewhere and reinforce the equation that aesthetic minimalism + limited functionality = greater desirability + useful control over the user.

I never hated the iPod per se. What I hated was watching the most flexible feature-rich players in the world lose market share, consumer desirability and, ultimately, existence. We shouldn't have had to wait a decade before HiFiMan provided a successor to iRiver's iHP140.

Here's what I'm hoping: for Apple to experience a number of post-Jobs failures that force it to take a role proportionate to everyone else's without killing its ability to sell its aesthetic and integrated approach to a large enough customer base to keep it solvent and its most talented people interested.

Meanwhile, companies all over the world could go back to trusting the talent in front of them rather than the recycled ideas of someone with a crushing market share.

I prefer brand agnosticism to brand theism or atheism. At this moment, I'm more annoyed by Amazon's crippling control over non-music content than I am at Apple's lawsuits and the sealed garden of its Amway-like tech, but both are pretty bad.

May 2012 be the year of sustainable tablet diversity and the triumph (for once) of content over fashion -- of freedom and practicality over restrictions and broken functionality.