It's about 10pm and I'm sitting here with a cup of tea instead of champagne because I've got a head cold that showed up right on schedule, like it does every New Year's Eve since I was about nineteen. My sister's out at some party in the city. I'm here with my laptop and the last of the Christmas cookies, which seems like a fair trade honestly.
Figured I'd do the thing where you guess what's coming instead of just listing what happened this year, because everybody and their cousin is writing a "2011 in review" post right now and I don't have the energy to compete with that. So, guesses. Genuine ones, not the safe kind.
Siri gets less magic, more normal. I've had the 4S for about six weeks now and I still ask it dumb questions when I'm bored on the bus. My guess is that by summer the novelty wears off for most people and it just becomes a feature you use for setting timers and texting while driving, which honestly might be the more useful outcome anyway. I don't think other phone makers are going to sit on their hands about this either. Voice stuff is going to be everywhere by next December, mark it down.
Android fragmentation gets worse before it gets better. Ice Cream Sandwich looks genuinely good from what I've seen on the Galaxy Nexus, way better than Gingerbread, but I'd put money on most Android phones out there still running something two versions old a year from now. Carriers just don't move fast on updates and I don't see why 2012 would be different. If anything the Carrier IQ mess (that logging software people found buried on a ton of phones last month, recording keystrokes and whatnot) is going to make carriers even more paranoid about what they let onto devices, not less.
Tablets under $250 are going to multiply. The Fire at $199 sold like crazy over the holidays, my cousin got one and already complained about the browser lagging, but the price point clearly worked. I think we see at least two or three other companies try the same move next year, cheap tablet, subsidized by content sales instead of hardware margin. Whether any of them are actually good is a separate question.
SOPA either dies loudly or passes and everyone loses their minds. Watched some of the House Judiciary hearing clips from a couple weeks back and it was kind of stunning how little some of these committee members seemed to understand about how the internet actually works. There's a real fight brewing here and I genuinely don't know which way it goes, but I don't think it just quietly disappears. Too many big companies on both sides now.
Apple without Jobs. This is the one I keep coming back to. It's been almost three months since he passed and so far nothing's really changed on the surface, the 4S shipped fine, the stores are still packed. But a company's identity isn't just quarterly earnings, and I'm curious whether 2012 is the year we start to see, even in small ways, decisions that feel different. Maybe not. Maybe Cook just keeps the machine running exactly as designed for years. I hope so, honestly, but I'll be watching for it.
Random smaller ones: I think Ubuntu keeps taking heat for Unity (I still switch back to a different desktop half the time, sorry Canonical, it's just not there yet for me), I think jQuery Mobile actually starts showing up on real sites instead of just demos, and I would not be surprised if we hear something concrete about Windows 8 beyond the developer preview by the middle of the year, given how much Microsoft's been talking it up.
None of this is a prediction I'd bet real money on. Last January I was convinced physical keyboards on phones had at least another two good years left in them and, well, look how that's going. So take all of the above with the appropriate grain of salt.
Anyway. Tea's gone cold, cookies are gone entirely, and I should probably at least be awake for midnight even if I'm doing it alone on the couch. See you all in 2012.