Where do you see Apple in 10 years?

Steve Jobs said it best:

"I can't even begin to imagine technology even five years from now, so I don't [bother commenting on what I think the future holds]."

Tim Cook said he wasn't in it for the long haul and planned to be retired long after Steve was still at the company. That may change now but he could step down in 10 years and pass the company to Scott Forstall after some mentoring at which point he will be around the same age as Cook is now.

In terms of products, there are some technology jumps we can expect based on what we've already seen. From 2001-2011, CPU power jumped up by a factor of about 32: 2^5 (doubles every 2 years) - this is borne out in benchmarks. GPU power in the same time jumped Geforce 2 MX (Doom 3 = 10FPS) -> Radeon 6750M (Doom 3 = 400FPS) around the same amount but it's more than that really as modern GPUs have fully programmable shaders.

In terms of storage, we have gone from entry models at 64MB RAM and 40GB HDD to 4GB RAM and 500GB so almost 100x RAM and 10x storage.

Now, if we compare a desktop from 2001 to a 2011 iPhone, the iPhone 4S is faster, has the same storage but much faster and 10x the RAM. The GPU raw performance is on par with the GPUs in desktops 10 years ago but again does more advanced things.

So, applying this to another 10 years, I expect that Apple will have a phone with a CPU and GPU on a single chip that runs as fast as the current 15" MBPs with the 6750M GPUs. They should have 256GB storage and 2-4GB RAM. This is all in a phone that is passively cooled. I actually expect them to cut back on performance so it lasts multiple days on battery.

I expect the Mac Pro to no longer exist. There will obviously always be a need for high performance computing but imagine a Mini that is 32x faster than what we have now and a giant box just isn't necessary, especially when they will have 100Gbps Thunderbolt connectors.

Imagine exporting a 1080p H.264 now and see that time drop from an hour to 2 minutes. They might move on to UltraHD or whatever but I think Apple will keep moving to smaller and thinner products and more wireless connections.

The concern will be that everyone will be able to do this so Apple may find it hard to set itself apart. You can see this happening now with the tablets and UltraBook laptops.

So many companies have been ruined by a transition to bad management that I think it is rational to worry about who is at the helm. Apple appears to be in good shape right now, but you never know how somebody with real talent for one position will perform in another.

Also one has to realize just how much cooler hardware runs today. That allows for a great deal of performance in a small package.

It pleases me to no end to realize that my iPhone is more powerful than my first four or five computers put together. To realize that all that power ends up in ones pocket running on a little battery all day is sweet.

At some point in the near future an iPhone or iPad will be all the computer most will need. It isn't there yet, though the iPad comes close for some. Once Apple is able to integrate a Thunderbolt port into "I" devices and drive large monitors from them, desktop hardware will become niche hardware.

This one I don't buy! There will always be demand for high performance workstations and frankly they will sell into the same markets. The Pro might come in a radically different box but the products goal will be to offer up all the compute potential possible at a given point in time and at a given price point.

I agree with the move to thin but worry very much about the transition to wireless. Sometimes it just doesn't make sense.

But everybody hasn't been able to do this as can be seen with tablets and UltraBooks! Apple has a huge lead in tablets and can secure that lead for another couple of years just buy building an A6 chip with Thunderbolt built in. Further they can customize that chip with a rather large engineering team, this gives Apple a significant advantage in and of itself.

While iPad 3 might be a bit early I can see this product eventually becoming extremely powerful and even more difficult for others to match. When you are able to tailor the product to the application you put yourself ahead of the competition. Considering the volumes Apple is moving just with Tablets it is easy to justify fully custom chips on an economic basis. As long as they can spread those developments across the other I devices going with custom chips is a no brainier. I don't see this advantage going away anytime soon as the other suppliers of custome ARM chips take the kitchen sink approach to draw as many customers as possible.

This is called "predicting the present." There are always technologies that follow some empirical formula for a period of time. However, you cannot predict the emergence of new technology or the death of old technology this way. For example, nothing about 2001 and certainly not 1991 predicted the iPhone, the iPad, or iCloud. Only a hopeless Apple fanboy would have dared predict that Apple was be biggest corporation on Earth based on market capitalization. Wireless printers? The dominance of all-in-ones over dedicated printers? The death of dial-up? The ubiquity of the PDF format?

It would be an interesting exercise to catalog how different the computer-based world is today compared to a decade ago. If you believe that technology and market changes over the next ten years will likely be even greater, then predicting what the next ten years will bring is a job entered into only by the foolish.

You made a good point without being an asshole. Nice job!

Edit: by "I've expected" I mean I'm expecting it to displace traditional laptop hardware at a far greater rate once some of those issues are resolved.

I've expected it to really blow up and I still do. There are ergonomic issues for those who spend a fair amount of time at a computer, but I'm sure if the device becomes suitable as a primary computer, these will eventually be overcome. I don't see the ipad becoming highly port centric. It's more likely that standards like wireless displayport will become favored there. It would make more sense with a device like the ipad. I don't see desktop displays going away completely. People like viewing things larger than a device like the ipad would permit, but the usability factor would make a huge difference there. Plugging a lot of stuff into an ipad seems kind of counter intuitive.

my guess:

iphone (small screen), ipad (medium screen), iHD (five large HD screen sizes = 20,30,40,50,60) with the 20 inch model acting as a possible lower priced option for the imac, but not a true replacement for it. It's possible that OS-XI products (new iCube) will act more like a local server (and wireless base station) where all the screens of your iOS devices (regardless of size) can connect to your single OS-XI product to give any of them Mac-like functionality when needed. The iCube would allow multiple modular (stackable) cubes connected via 'thunderbolt' to allow a person to recreate the equivalent of a new Mac Pro or something more powerful if needed. iCloud will continue to add more and more features until it becomes a true Net-centric OS and reaches a level of sophistication and reliability that it truly replaces the need for OS-XI for most users.

2012= Quad-Cores for new iOS (iphone5, pad3, iHD1),
2013= Quad-Cores plus improvements for iOS (iphone 5S, ipad 4, iHD2)
2014= Six-Cores for new iOS (iphone 6,ipad 5, iHD3)
2015= Six-Cores plus improvements for iOS (iphone 6S, ipad 6, iHD4)
2016= Eight-Cores for new iOS (iphone 7, ipad 7, iHD5)
2017= Adding additional cores is no longer relevant and a new technology/metric emerges which results in the creation of of new types of devices to coincide with widespread 5G wireless adoption.

2017 will also mark the 10 year anniversary of the iphone/iOS and this would be the likely time for Apple to unveil an all new product category with iCloud becoming a true NET-OS and Siri could take a quantum leap in intelligence and become our 'Big Sister'

To some extent, although around 2001, I owned a laptop and found it very awkward to use in certain situations due to the form factor and I wished someone could make a computer that was equivalent to just the screen of the 15" Powerbook and I hope one day they will.

I was always frustrated by the dumbphones and liked the full keyboard on the Blackberry but they were expensive and I didn't feel justified the high price. I'd used resistive touch screens over the years and usually with a stylus and it wasn't right either.

The form that phones and tablets eventually took on couldn't have been predicted exactly but they were solutions to problems that have been around for a long time. The death of dial-up was inevitable. Having a porn surfing adventure cut short by an incoming phone call was never going to work.

There are absolutely things that cannot be extrapolated to a meaningful conclusion. I don't think anyone (including Apple) could have predicted their success even going back just 5 years. Until I picked up an iPhone and started using it, I thought it was going to mean certain failure for Apple based on my past experience of resistive touch devices. But afterwards, it was quite clear where things would go and you could have predicted many things in 2011 from 2007 like 1080p video recording.


I'm sure there will have to be many revisions made to predictions over the years but as time goes on, the more data points exist to be able to judge the progress of technology. Way back years ago, everything was very uncertain as it was all emerging technology. We're at a point now where our lives depend on technology for everything and there's a clearer path ahead.

I personally think the smartphone is the ultimate goal but it may also be a watch like Woz suggested. A computer that is an assistant that you rely on for everything.

Of course there might be advances that come out of the blue that push things in a new direction but we should be able to predict a minimum level of advancement e.g we will at the very least have mobile phones as powerful as 2011 desktops.


I could see Apple switching to Intel for mobile somewhere in the roadmap and converging the desktop and mobile operating systems.

Cupertino.

The only answer that's likely to be correct!

The buzzword concept of ten years ago was digital convergence. Everybody was talking about how it was just around the corner. The road to the future is littered with the bleached bones of people who tried to predict.

I think the road to the future is lined with the La-Z-Boys of ANALYSTS who just kick back, make up absolute trash, and wait for their money to roll in because they get paid to do it.

I'm not trying to defend analyst here but one has to realize that a good part of Apples success lately came from predicting near term consumer wants. The first iPod, iTunes and then flash based iPods are all about grasping future trends. Sometimes Apple grasped these trends even before consumers realized what they wanted. This isn't so much predicting the future as making it.

Technically there are other realities. If you can't see into the future you really don't know when technology will ripen for a specific implementation you have in mind. IPad based on ARM processors is a good example. Apparently the technology behind iPad was in development for years. However the device might have been grossly different if they did not look to ARM as a future processor. In effect they predicted a future where ARM would have all of its ducks in a row with technology suitable for driving an iPad. This is still a case of making ones own future but that comes from taking an educated guess.

I use iPad here because the use of ARM technology has made the machine a very unique device. One could only imagine what iPad would be like built around Intel technology of the time. Thus there is little doubt that somebody at Apple predicted sometime before (a couple of years) iPads release that ARM would be the way to go.

I thought intel was having a lot of trouble pushing their atom processors in general as opposed to just to Apple. Anyway I hope intel does improve there. Competition is good.

I disagree rather strongly. Apple's success has not been due to its success in chasing consumer demand. It has been enormously successful in leading consumer demand. Understand the difference.

Intel is having issues pushing ATOM. Frankly it is getting worst for ATOM as you have ARM coming up from below and AMDs Zacate from above.

In any event I don't think I was clear there in my message, I was trying to say that ARM allowed Apple to introduce the iPad. If Apple had to rely upon Intel the device would have been dramatically different.

If you look at iPods Apple trailed consumer desire for some time. Be it iTunes, Flash based iPods or whatever consumer demand was there before Apple was.

I really think that Steve Jobs understood that (when done properly) people love electronic devices because they can act as extensions of our nervous system. When something is intuitive and 'just works', we naturally respond to it as if it's a new limb and an extension of ourselves (we feel empowered). This is also the reason why people hate to learn/relearn some new (and poorly designed) device or software upgrade because it feels as if a limb as been removed and sewn somewhere it doesn't belong.

One of the unintended problems of having really smart techie people making computers is that they understand programs and functions that most people don’t. So when they’re done with their project they think it’s really easy to use, but when it gets handed over to the masses they end up being totally frustrated with it’s complexity and non-intuitiveness. This is where Steve Jobs was brilliant, by bringing artists into the mix he was able to get a better understanding on how to make things easier and more intuitive to use, and finding creative new uses for the technology that were previously unheard of.

“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts." ― Marshall McLuhan

This will NOT happen if either party is intelligent at all.


Well, yeah. It's about two decades too early for that.


Nope. Won't be called OS X or it won't be 3D. They're definitionally exclusive.


I'm confused. I thought this thread was about 2021 not 2081. I personally don't believe this will EVER happen because people refuse to build out tech when it's more profitable for them to not, and people actively prevent tech from being profitable for them to build out.

Thing is, there's having an opinion and having a POD seventy-five years ago where no World War II allowed for much faster development of technology.

One's believable. The other can't happen in this universe. It will have happened in at least one other, but THAT vision ten years out from here? Not possible.

MAYBE if you're a billionaire that doesn't mind blowing three million on a brand new house wired to do all this. Maybe. But not for any existing houses and not for anyone but the super-rich.

Seriously? I don't think it's out of the question to think that in 10 years Apple will be in the business of making cars. Yes, cars.

At the very least, I expect them to be making operating systems for cars, specifically self-driving AIs.

I know it sounds crazy, but already navigation is very simple and convenient, whereas once it wasn't. Can you believe there was a time when people actually stopped to ask for directions? I mean, asking a flesh and blood human being, not Siri. How much further is it until we're able to ask Siri to just drive us where we want to go. If not 10 years than 15 or 20, but taking into account accelerating change as hypothesized by Kurzweil, it's probably much sooner than 20 years.

Let's be crystal clear honest about this... would you trust a car to drive you made by Apple or by OEMs running licensed versions of Windows Auto 3 or maybe an "open" copy of Google Road tracking your driving habits and advertising you places other than where you want to go?