Our Technology Future - Consumer Tech

So, it’s hard to imagine discussing the future of technology without looking at consumer tech. I can promise you one thing… this post will not be promising much you couldn’t figure out yourself.

When it comes to consumer technology, predicting the future is a risky gambit. You either bet on the low hanging fruit, or you go out on a very flimsy limb. The reason is that it’s difficult to judge what the general public will latch onto or what ideas tech companies will try to push. Partly you could say I just have no imagination.

For example, the Ultrabook phenomenon is incomprehensible to me. What is an Ultrabook? It’s a lighter, thinner, smaller, laptop. That’s all it is really. They select a different set of CPUs to keep thermals down, usually strip out the optical drive, but and they are all between 10” and 14” in screen size. But that really amounts to nothing but a smaller laptop. So why market it as an “Ultrabook”? Because it gets more money and attention that way. It makes it sound like some kind of amazing new technology. It’s just a smaller laptop. The term “Ultrabook” is mainly just for marketing purposes. Lighter, thinner, laptops have been a trend since the introduction of the laptop computer. Renaming them something else now holds no real tangible meaning.

Another example is the apparent clamor for Smartwatches. Samsung and Qualcomm have only in the last couple days revealed their own plans for the new devices. Quite simply you wear the device on your wrist and it operates in conjunction with your Smartphone to relay notifications or short messages that would otherwise be on your phone, onto the screen of the watch. To me, it’s another useless device. You have to have the phone in your pocket. If you get messages on your phone it rings or vibrates. Why do I also need my watch to tell me that I got a message? Are we really to the point where it’s too much trouble to pull a phone out of our pocket and glance at the screen?

These examples show the unpredictability. They come out of the ether and hold indeterminate sustainability or staying power. But what of PCs? There has been a lot of talk of the “end of PCs” or a “post PC era” that has begun in which we will cease to use PCs. Is there are reality there? No.

Admittedly I am a little biased because I love PC technology. But part of the reason for my determined statement that PCs are not going anywhere is because the talk about PCs going away is bunk. PCs are changing, not disappearing. You say the word “PC” and the first thought is the black tower on top or next to our desk with the screen and keyboard and mouse attached to it. But laptops are PCs, tablets are PCs, netbooks, notebooks, even Smartphones are all essentially PCs in a different form. I argue we should stop calling them “Smartphones” since very few people seem to even care about, much less use, the “phone” capabilities.

Like with the laptop versus Ultrabook thing, the goal for PCs has always been to make them smaller and more mobile while retaining or enhancing power. The laptop itself was a step in this process. However, there is a basic fact, which is that something larger will have more power. The chip inside of a Smartphone is about the smallest functional consumer processor. Put several of them together, working harmoniously, and you have a more powerful system. You start following that rationale and you eventually get a room with a supercomputer. The question is mostly about what you want to do.

That is the key to the consumer tech future; what will we want to do? We’ve seen in the last few years the attempt to make 3D a part of the average household. That is the response to the public’s desire for immersive entertainment; the feeling of being right there in the action whether it’s a movie or a sporting event. That has led to the advancement of higher definition television. But as we’ve seen, like occurred with the last attempt to bring 3D technology to the masses in the 70s and 80s, the technology sounds much better than its application provides. 3D TVs are very expensive, and produce very questionable results. Many people chose to go to regular display movies instead of the 3D ones, and of the very limited 3D options for TV have dried up due to very low pickup.

Curved OLED screens and 4K resolution are the newest advancement in screens.

4K is the more tangible in the immediate term. It is a resolution of 3840x2160 (as opposed to 1080p which is 1920x1080), and is the biggest jump in displays since 1080p, or 2560x1440 for PC monitors. The benefit is greater pixel density for better image quality, greater color reproduction, and better contrast. Part of the UHD (Ultra High Definition) spectrum, it promises, similar to the switch to 1080p, to offer more to the picture you currently get. 4K televisions have already started rolling out, and even a couple 4K computer monitors have come out, but they are very expensive (again, like high definition televisions relative to standard definition TVs at their introduction).

Curved OLED is about what it sounds like. The idea is that with very large screens, or sometimes even with smaller ones, you want the image to wrap around your field of vision. PC gamers achieve this by way of multiple monitors. In a home theater setting, that means better viewing throughout the room, not just directly in front of the screen. It’s a nice evolution of display technology. Right now it’s unseemly expensive, meaning it will take some time before it catches on in a major way.

What will come in the future is anyone’s guess. The truth is no one can be entirely certain. Increasing resolution is probably one of the most directly capable things that can be done. It’s simply stuffing more pixels in a given spot. The challenge is accomplishing that feat in a reasonable space, at a reasonable cost. PCs will keep getting smaller and more powerful, although I think the general public is running out of things to do with that power. The Smartwatch emerges from the sci-fi dream of a supercomputer on your wrist, projecting the information in front of you as a hologram or directly to your eye (a la Google glass). For that reason I don’t think it too farfetched that Google will make their own Smartwatch designed to work with their Google Glass (something like packing more computing power into the watch to relay to the glasses). The continual miniaturization of technology will allow for the Smartwatch to go from its current form as an ill-timed, mostly useless, gadget, to a truly useful addition to the pantheon of consumer technology.

For desktops the number of cores, the clock frequencies, will go higher, while the TDP, lithography, and general size, will go lower. Hopefully we will finally get motherboards with integrated wireless adapters. USB will likely take over more and more connectivity duties as it gets more powerful. I don’t think Thunderbolt will see much more gains. And of course GPUs will advance in virtual lock-step with CPUs, powering the advanced display technologies.

We are quickly approaching the point where it will be inconceivable for screens to get any thinner or mobile devices to get any thinner. Holographic technology is a popular dream, but it lacks any reasonable fact-based method of implementation, so some breakthrough would have to develop there. Our cars will get safer, cleaner. Starting next year we may start seeing self-driving cars (which I personally think is dull and boring). The trends we have seen will continue onward. Anything else will be just baseless speculation at this point. But who knows? There could be an amazing new technology resting on someone’s drawing board, waiting to be a real revolution in the consumer technology world.