Apple just finished its first fifty years, making this an ideal opportunity to look ahead to what we can expect from the next five decades.
Having watched the company progress from the Apple II to the iPhone, I’m as qualified as anyone to peer into the future of computing. Here’s what we can look forward to.
Predicting Apple’s future is a dicey business
My decades of experience writing about technology have taught me that predicting the future of tech is challenging. Projections can be wildly over-optimistic, so they include flying cities on the moon. But they can also be not optimistic enough, so they miss out on important changes. There’s no better example than the forecast that computers would someday need to be the size of a city block to be useful.
I’ll try to walk a middle road. And tracking Apple for all these years will certainly help.
Apple’s next ten years: Foldables
In the near term, Apple will still continue to improve some of its current products without significant modifications. The iMac isn’t expected to get an OLED screen until 2029 at the earliest, for example. And the Mac mini will simply get faster processors year after year.
But there are a couple of big near-term changes coming to some of Apple’s signature products: foldable displays and more touchscreens.
The first iPhone with a folding screen is expected this fall. I predict it’ll be a huge hit because Apple has a long history of turning other companies’ failures into mainstream success. Users will love the iPhone Fold’s large screen so very much that it’ll be followed by annual updates until the foldable is eventually the standard iPhone design.
At about the same time, Apple will add a touchscreen to the top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. With touchscreens on our iPhones and iPads, it’s only natural that the tech comes to MacBooks. Again, this will become a mainstream feature after a few years… and a lot of UI improvements.
In about five years, we’ll get a computer with a 20-inch folding screen. No keyboard — it’s all touchscreen. Whether it’s macOS or iPadOS might not matter much, with Apple continuing to port features between these operating systems. Again, the appeal here is the very large screen in a portable computer.
Apple 2036 to 2046: Smart glasses
What will the dominant technology of 10 to 20 years from today has already taken its first steps, and will continue to improve for years: smart glasses and visionOS.
Currently, some people mistake Vision Pro for a flop. It’s not, it’s a look into Apple’s future. The software is amazing, but we can’t make the hardware small enough for full-featured smart glasses running visionOS to be practical. Not yet. Apple is working on it, though.
The most consistent trend over Apple’s first 50 years was the devices shrinking in size while getting more powerful. That will continue, and somewhere around 2036, a computer more powerful than today’s MacBooks will fit in a pair of glasses.
And even before that happens, smart glasses will start replacing iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches. These glasses will be able to overlay virtual screens anywhere around the user, making carrying around a phone or tablet unnecessary. And as smart glasses grow more powerful, they will become the only computer we need.
This will be Apple’s dominant product for at least a decade, replacing everything else. As Steve Jobs once said, “It’s better to cannibalise your own products than let someone else do it.”
Apple 2046 to 2076: Tone down your expectations
I’m not so full of hubris as to think I can accurately predict exactly where computers will go 30 to 50 years from today. But my long experience shows me where they aren’t going.
Apple’s first fifty years took us from klunky desktop computers to sleek smartphones, and that’s an amazing improvement. But when it comes right down to it, an iPhone is a Macintosh that fits in a pocket. It’s not an utterly different device — someone in 1986 who’s familiar with a Macintosh could use an iPhone with a couple of minutes of instruction. It’s essentially tapping icons, not clicking on them. Just with a lot more features.
So I don’t see future Apple products dropping the now-traditional graphical user interface for voice control or brain scanning or some other sci-fi dream. The icons will be on virtual displays projected by smart glasses — and maybe someday contact lenses — but they won’t go away.
And while AI will bring many changes, the tech will have similar effects as the internet — it’ll alter the way we do things, not what we do. That’s because the people of fifty years from now won’t be radically different from today. We’ll still want to do the same sorts of tasks that we do with computers now.
So forget about silly predictions of AIs surgically implanted into our brains. We also won’t be arguing over whether AIs in humanoid robot bodies deserve the right to vote. We’re just going to have smaller, faster computers with AI features. And the best of these will be made by Apple.
Ed Hardy has been writing full-time about tech for 25 years, and using it for much longer than that. His intro to Apple was a Macintosh SE/30 (which he still has), but now he uses a 13-inch iPad Pro as his primary computer.
That’s because he’s a “tablet first” type of guy. Rather than use a Macbook, he connects a keyboard case to the iPad. And instead of a desktop Mac, he connects his tablet to a 27-inch display and full-size keyboard. (So don’t try to tell him that everyone has to use a Mac to be productive.)
Before coming to Cult of Mac, Ed wrote for NotebookReview, TabletPCReview and Brighthand, as well as other sites.
