That is the interesting question isn't it? It seems like for the first time that all the big advancements and progressions are being driven from the consumer side. For nearly all of tech history, and certainly the history of personal computers, the big advancements came from the high-end profesional markets and trickled down into the consumers hands once the tech became affordable. Now, lots of advancements are going the opposite way. What was pioneered in smart phones has tricked up to tablets, and now what is working with those technologies is trickling up to the personal computer. It is going to be really exciting to see how it all shakes out.
It's actually more disappointing than exciting. The reason that all the changes are coming from the consumer end is because professional markets are no longer coming up with good ideas. CPUs have pretty much reached a standstill until a material switch from silicone (which dooms legacy equipment), software speeds have pretty much reached a standstill until an architecture change from ARM/x86 (which also dooms legacy equipment).
There's just so much legacy equipment in place that the big change is never going to happen.
So what's happening now is that consumers are starting to focus more on consumption-end changes, which makes
Flood123 deleted his post, but I don't think it's far-fetched or ridiculous at all either. A couple of years ago I read an article on one of the tech websites that predicted a "three-screen" strategy, and it makes too much sense to ignore. The theory is that Apple is moving towards a convergence of hardware (and software to a degree) platforms so that ideally, a consumer would own a large screen (iTV), medium screen (iPad) and a small screen (iPhone). All would provide access to the same content, thus allowing you to consume or utilize the content anywhere you were with obvious tradeoffs of portability vs screen size. Most techies blow this off because they think it's ridiculous that they would get rid of Mac. I don't think Apple necessarily plans to get rid of the Mac, just that it would be marginalized. Most tech geeks just don't realize how much in the minority we are.
I think Steve probably realized awhile back that most people don't use the applications that us tech geeks "need" a computer for - website programming, photoshop, design work, etc. iOS is designed to optimize content consumption, rather than creation. Content creation is only utilized by a small percentage of the population. Thus, as more and more people get an iPad, they'll completely forego getting a PC or Mac. I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see Apple release a hybrid iPad/iMac - an iPad with a 20" screen that you use on a desktop. It could serve as a fourth device for those who want something on their desktop that has more screen real estate than their iPad.
I know a lot of people will disagree with the above sentiment, but I've observed this recently with my own parents whom I gave my old Macbook Pro to, a couple of years ago. When I recently convinced them to get an iPad, they really liked it (OS X still confuses them), and have started using the Macbook less and less in spite of the smaller screen size.
Website programming, photoshop, and design work are nothing - what about computer research? You know, us guys who are plugging away at the Terminal and filesystem, interacting with the kernel 8 hours a day? Puts the rest of you to shame...
But really, this is what I see happening in the future. Look at the iOSification of OSX. Look at Apple's market - 77% iOS, 14% OSX. Look at the slippery slope that's starting to occur as Apple keeps adding features like Gatekeeper, that regard anything not directly from Apple as "dangerous."
Apple is starting to perfect their walled garden - and I, for one, am not pleased with this perfection...
And I guess if schools start using iPads we won't have to ever worry about the computer science field ever being flooded - filesystem? command line? what are you talking about?
Soon enough I feel that OSX will have to be delegated to just a small 8GB partition in the back of my hard drive and have Ubuntu take over - that is, if Apple's still kind enough to let me install "third-party software."
Actually, to any software developer it is quite obvious that there is no convergence at all where it counts to end users, and that is in the user interface. Technologies are converging, which is beneficial to all the developers, but not the UI.
On the other hand, it seems that Microsoft got it just as wrong as you did when they start their copiers and produced Windows 8 - perfect convergence between desktop and tablet with the result that you can't use it on either
At least W8 is a full operating system, complete with command-line, filesystem, third-party apps, and most likely the ability to run other full-fledged OSs like Linux distros.
