Yesterday I saw a group of working class Jose’s standing around a taco truck at midday eating lunch. There were four or five pickup trucks parked near the taco truck. There were no other patrons.
The scene reminded me of photos I’ve seen of the original lunch wagons from the 19th century which in turn became the fast food franchises of the 20th century – or even the trendy food carts of the 21st century.
Certainly, the hamburger or steak sandwich would not be as popular today if it did not allow for Americans to eat on the go and for restaurants to serve more customers than they can seat.
In a way, a similar transformation is taking place now with information products. It used to be that you could only do computing by going to a place with a giant computer. Then the computer got smaller and cheaper and you could compute from inside your home.
Now, you can compute on the go and the result is a great deal more computing and many more “computers” – meaning both the people doing the computing as well as the devices they use to compute. (Which could make Twitter something like a hot dog stand or a bag of nuts. Or both.)
All of which prompted me to think: if Apple builds a daylight-compatible Retina display, the next lock-in cycle for tablet computers is probably theirs.
Update, two years later: I was barking up the wrong tree. It’s not about seeing the display in daylight. It’s about speech recognition.