I remember when I was just starting high school, I would play around on various sites trying to come up with the computer I would own ten years later. It is now eight years later, and I was way off base on certain things, and pretty close on others.
Here is an example of what I thought consumer level computers would be like in 2010:
- 12 GHz Processor
- 6GB of RAM
- 2TB Hard Drive Space
- 64x DVD Burner
- 2GHz Video Processor with 2GB Memory
With recent news that Samsung has created a 4GB chip to allow desktops and laptops up to 32GB or RAM (Engadget), and Western Digital drawing attention for their 2TB hard drive (Engadget) it is easy to see how close I was on some predictions.
The biggest mistakes I made were in assuming that clock speeds would continue to increase over the next decade, and that increasing the speed of DVD drives would be important.
I think, what is most amazing to me, is that other than the CPU and the DVD Burner, I could have created this computer a few months ago for under $2,500, especially considering that when I made this list, we had just bought a Compaq computer for nearly that price, and it’s features were nothing glamourous.
How will consumer level computer technology change over the next two years? What about the next decade?
My predictions are that we will see more processor cores being fit on a single CPU, with it maxing out at around sixteen. We will also see a continued trend on packing in more RAM until a new technology comes along to bring CPU’s and RAM closer together, maybe eventually tying them into one packaged product.
Another interesting trend I am seeing is the increasing dependance on the Internet. With applications first going online to the web, and now coming back to the desktop thanks to Google Gears and Adobe AIR, I wouldn’t be surprised if hard drive sizes stopped being a key selling point to most consumers. Gamers, video editors and whatnot will still opt for larger hard drives, but the price will flatten out, and stop dropping at the rapid rate we experience today as people do most of their computing on the cloud. Storage and applications as a service will grow as an industry. People will pay twenty-five dollars a month to access a whole suite of applications as well as storage, paying only for their computer and operating system as a “one time fee”, while nearly everything else will be free, per-use fee, monthly fee or yearly fee to access.
Thumb drives will make most optical drives obsolete in the next decade. Even movies will either be downloaded right from the Internet onto your computer, television or set-top box or you’ll bring your USB drive to a video kiosk, purchase a movie rental, a DRM-laden file will be transferred to it, and then disappear once your rental time is up.
Because most applications will run through things like Google Gears or Adobe AIR, they will quickly become platform independent, allowing operating systems to compete in other ways.
Mobile devices are really where things are heading. Desktop computer’s are nice, but this whole Netbook craze has proven that its days could be numbered. I still think a more modular computer design where I could bring my screen with me while on the go, and then dock it at home for a more powerful computing experience would be ideal.
What are your thoughts on the future of computers? Have you been surprised at how fast they’ve changed over the last decade?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I was once told by a salesman that we would never need more than 8MB of RAM and 500MB of HD.
When I worked as a computer salesman, I told people that they would never need more than a 1GHz Processor…
Those stats are closer than you think really, given the relative speed of reading solid state memory and bluray and such (rather than the comparatively slow speed of dvdrom’s) and the fact that you can now get quadcore processors at 2.5GHZ+ each (10 GHZ or more total)…not including the offloading of processing to the video card(s), you can come pretty damn close to 12 GHZ without breaking the bank TOO badly..not the norm for the consumer level yet, but it can be done. Hell, I only have a dual-core from almost 2 years ago and it’s more than 5GHZ total, and that was the mid-level…