Originally posted by sparky76
Better hope 10.7 is cool - I don't think we will have the cool-looking machines by then. The computer should be hidden. No need for a keyboard - voice recognition will be the main input. Also, no need for a screen - every room will have a screen - in the living room it will be a large wall screen which is the TV screen or for movies or for the computer, as required.
A lot of people seem to envision pocket computers doing everything via voice recognition within the next 5 or 10 years, but I really don't think that's likely. If you look at the evolution of computers over the past 20 years, although we've added a lot of friendliness and media-integration features (your computer can now essentially replace your entertainment center if you want), the basics haven't changed--you buy a box and hook it up to a monitor with a keyboard plugged in. The biggest difference is the third step, which is connecting it to the Internet.
We've had voice recognition in the MacOS for years and speech synthesis for even longer, but the fact is most people neither care nor use it.
I'm pretty sure that ten years from now we'll still be using tower-shaped computers with monitors like we have today, we'll still have keyboards and mice, and your gui probably won't look a whole heck of a lot different from the way it does now. Some people will still be using 10.3, and a handful will probably still have OS9.
Pervasive computing might happen (though I don't much care for it), and AI-enabled voice recognition could, but natural language recognition isn't likely to have advanced all that far within a decade, at least according to the most recent article out of MIT that I read.
Oh, and a comment on auto-OS-repairs: If they could be made obsolete, that'd be great, but I still wonder if having each file with a built-in checksum to detect unintentional modifications and/or corruption wouldn't be a bad idea, since bad things happen sometimes even when an installer doesn't do them.
