iPhone 2014 – what will it be like?

Brinna’s brother has an mobile, so she wants her iPhone now. If we stick with the Junior High rule, that means 2014.

So what will the iPhone of 2014 be like? Will it vote?

I bet it will be a lot like the iPhone of 2009. Mostly better, in some ways worse. That’s the way things usually go after the first mad sprint of a real breakthrough.

MacOS Classic had some serious issues (esp post-multifinder with stability and TCP/IP support), but eighteen years later OS X is not an immensely better OS. It’s mostly better, but there have been significant regressions too. The real shocker was the transition from the command line to the very first Mac.

Equally dramatically, digital cameras went from near worthless to 5 megapixel SLRs in just a few years. Since then, however, progress has been gradual.

So it’s reasonable to expect the iPhone-equivalents of 2014 to follow the same incremental path.

We will see more speech UI development and some workable speech-to-text input. We will probably see better support of external displays, and we may even see a 1992-PalmOS-style external keyboard. Laptops will be squeezed between netbooks and iPhone-equivalents. Augmented reality apps will be mainstream, and we’ll have more bandwidth.

Otherwise, pretty much what we have now.

Which is really an amazing statement about what Apple has done to the mobile industry.