During the Apple-Samsung patent trial this summer, it was revealed that Eddie Cue, Apple's Internet software and services chief, had allegedly convinced a very reluctant Steve Jobs that Apple should make a miniature iPad as soon as possible. In an email to heavy hitters Tim Cook, Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller, Cue links a GigaOM article, "Why I Just Dumped the iPad (Hint: Size Matters)," and notes that he was beginning to wear down Steve's famous stubbornness:

I believe there will be a 7" market and we should do one. I expressed this to Steve several times since Thanksgiving (2010) and he seemed very receptive the last time. I found email, books, facebook and video very compelling on a 7".

We'll never know if Steve actually signed off on the device we now see plastered on Apple.com, but we can be fairly certain that if he had, he still harbored some degree of skepticism about the whole thing. Even if he had backed off his sandpaper comments and understood its merits, it's unlikely he would have completely flip-flopped.

The iPad mini certainly adds another gorgeous iOS device to Apple's catalog--as thin as the iPhone 5 and lighter than the smaller Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire--but success isn't measured in lustful stares. This is the first truly new product Apple has released since Jobs' death--and it might be one he wouldn't have signed off on.

But he would have embraced the challenge. Steve was aware of the stumbling blocks, the biggest being price. I wrote last week that I expected the iPad mini to slide in under $250, an extremely attractive price point that would have elevated it to a must-buy for just about anyone; even Android users curious about what all the fuss is about could justify picking one up. Seventy-nine dollars might not seem like that big of a difference, but by crossing the psychological $300 barrier, Apple has shut off a fairly significant segment of the population: iPad users.

At $249 or even $299, the iPad mini is something of an impulse buy--I would have no doubt justified getting a mini as a second iPad strictly for traveling purposes--but $329 shuts off that conversation before it starts. It might not be overpriced for what you're getting, but Apple may have made the iPad mini a bit too luxurious for the market it's supposedly entering; at $199, the Fire and Nexus 7 are try-after-you-buy purchases, but Apple didn't build a cheap companion piece here. As Jonathan Ive calls it, it's "a concentration, not a reduction."

It's like when Apple released the iPod mini. With a significantly smaller and lighter enclosure, and about 75 percent less storage (4 GB vs. 15 GB), the iPod mini was just $50 less than its older brother. Of course, Apple had nary a single competitor back then, but the message Steve sent was the same: Small doesn't mean cheap.

I never actually expected Apple to build a cut-rate iPad, but with the same non-retina display and A5 chip as the iPad 2 (with a smaller body), Apple would easily make profit at $299. The $329 price tag is clearly meant to differentiate the iPad mini from its competitors. Apple isn't creating its own market with the iPad mini, but it's not really entering one either; Amazon and Google didn't pave the way for the iPad mini, the iPad did.

Much like that first little iPod, the iPad mini is an iPad alternative, not a companion. Apple isn't necessarily targeting Nexus and Fire buyers here; rather, the iPad mini is going after Apple's own customers: iPhone and iPod touch users who previously balked at the iPad due to size or price. It's a gamble for sure, perhaps the biggest since the iPad first launched.

But it's one Steve would have relished. No matter what side of the fence he was on.