The digital universe is expanding. The personal computer marked the dawn of the digital age. That seems like a lifetime ago. (And it is.) Today, your digital life is everywhere.
Rising with the PC was the game station, personal computers customized to play games. I remember the Atari 800 my mother bought the family back in 1978 or so.
Ten years later came the cell phone, and the wireless era was born.
Music went digital with the MP3 players of the 1990s. Apple figured out how to do portable digital music properly with the iPod in 2001. Today few kids clamor for a stereo system, let alone know what such a thing is.
Smartphones blossomed in the late 1990s. Then Apple, once again, showed the world how it could be done. Hot on the heels of the iPhone was the iPad, ushering in the era of tablet computing.
The detritus of the digital age lives in heaps along the sides of the information superhighway: The home stereo, the land line, the typewriter, the video arcade. I believe digital cameras will be around for a while as separate devices; my little Nikon Coolpix is far more sophisticated than anything offered in a phone or tablet, but it’s days are numbered.
Another victim of the digital revolution, although a silent one, is the television set.
The old glass-screen CRT televisions are long, long gone. They’re relics, like the console TVs of the last century. “TVs are furniture” the advertisements once said.
Even the LCD and plasma TVs are going away, replaced by Internet-read televisions. In fact, it will soon be more common to connect your TV to a network (wired or Wi-Fi) than to a TV cable. Don’t believe for an instant that the thought of such a thing has the cable companies freaked out.
Home TVs will soon be replaced by monitors, which is effectively what an HDTV is. My HDTV has a DVI input as well as a USB port, so it doesn’t take a genius to see such a thing coming.
The big question for me is whether all these devices converge or remain separate. Convergence seems to be the theme, and my vote goes for the cell phone/tablet as the hub of your digital life. A docking station would instantly connect that hub to a large screen monitor, speakers, mass storage, and input devices like a mouse and keyboard.
On the short-term horizon, I’m curious about the console gaming market. The Xbox 360 is over seven years old. That’s antique technology! So why are the console manufacturers sitting on the sidelines?
I am curious about the future of the laptop. They’re obviously necessary, and one time I would have predicted that the laptop would be the hub of your future digital life. But they’ll just keep packing more and more stuff into those phones and tablets, which makes the laptop’s future look dim as well.
On the whole, however, the state of the art looks promising for 2013 and beyond.
