Last year about this time, I set down some predictions for high tech in the year 2013. I usually fail miserably at getting even the simplest things right. So how’s my consistency?
First come what last year I called “Near-Certain Predictions”:
Apple TV.
Nope. Didn’t happen, They updated the Apple TV player, but what really happened was that Google surprised everyone with Chromecast. I’m hoping Apple does better in 2014, and I’ll be writing about that on Wednesday.
iPhone 5s. I could say “iPhone 6,” but Apple has this “S” thing going with the odd-year phones. I expect it to be ho-hum. The stock will drop.
Nailed this one, even the stock drop, but it was a gimme. The stock has recovered, which it usually does. I’ll have to wax on Apple’s upcoming iPhone line when I make next year’s predictions later this week.
Windows 8 is a dog. I put this prediction in this section on purpose. I really don’t think Windows 8 will be widely-adopted.
Yeah! Two in a row! I’m on a roll.
Cell Phone Viruses. This could just be a scare tactic from McAfee, the people who panicked the computer world about the Michelangelo non-virus event many moons ago, or it could be real. I’m voting (reluctantly) for real.
Nope, and thank-goodness.
In the out-there categories, I predicted the following:
Image Searching
Yep. It works. My example was “Monkey eating a banana” and such a search yields fruitful results on Google Image Search and Bing. Eventually the “find pictures like this one” will work perfectly. In fact, face recognition is getting to the scary point: Facebook told me that it recognized my son in one of my pictures and asked if I wanted to tag him. I find that disturbing.
Biometric Logins
We’re not there yet, and Apple’s attempt to add fingerprint recognition on the iPhone 5-whatever proved to be kind of iffy. I do see a point in the future where facial or voice recognition is used instead of typing a password, but not yet.
In my “Off-The-Wall Prediction” category, I wished more than evaluated that Facebook would melt down. Didn’t happen. And that’s sad, of course, because Facebook is not the shining example of humanity I would want to show the alien armada that comes to destroy us.
On Wednesday: My dismal predictions for 2014!
