In 10 years, iPhone won’t be a ‘phone’
It's 2027, and you're walking down the street, confident you'll arrive at your destination even though you don't know where it is. You may not even remember why your device is telling you to go there.
There's a voice in your ear giving you turn-by-turn directions and, in between, prepping you for this meeting. Oh, right, you're supposed to be interviewing a dog whisperer for your pet-psychiatry business. You arrive at the coffee shop, look around quizzically, and a woman you don't recognize approaches. A display only you can see highlights her face and prints her name next to it in crisp block lettering, Terminator-style. Afterward, you'll get an automatically generated transcript of everything the two of you said.
As the iPhone this week marks the 10th anniversary of its first sale, it remains one of the most successful consumer products in history. But by the time it celebrates its 20th anniversary, the "phone" concept will be entirely uprooted: That dog-whisperer scenario will be brought to you even if you don't have an iPhone in your pocket.
Sure, Apple may still sell a glossy rectangle. (At that point, iPhones may also be thin and foldable, or roll up into scrolls like ancient papyri.) But the suite of apps and services that is today centered around the physical iPhone will have migrated to other, more convenient and equally capable devices -- a "body area network" of computers, batteries and sensors residing on our wrists, in our ears, on our faces and who knows where else. We'll find ourselves leaving the iPhone behind more and more often.
Trying to predict where technology will be in a decade may be a fool's errand, but how often do we get to tie up so many emerging trends in a neat package?
Apple is busy putting ever more powerful microprocessors, and more wireless radios, in every one of its devices. Siri is getting smarter and popping up in more places. Meanwhile Apple is going deep on augmented reality, giving developers the ability to create apps in which our physical world is filled with everything from Pokemon to whatever IKEA furniture we want to try in our living rooms. All these technologies -- interfacing with our smart homes, smart cars, even smart cities -- will constitute not just a new way to interact with computers but a new way of life. And of course, worrisome levels of privacy invasion.
Apple's acquisitions -- it buys a company every three to four weeks, Chief Executive Tim Cook has said -- tend to be highly predictive of its future moves. Since it first bought Siri in 2010, Apple has continued to make acquisitions in artificial intelligence -- Lattice Data, Turi and