There are several guarantees in life: death, taxes and the eventuality of being wrong if you make a habit of issuing predictions. It doesn’t matter what you’re predicting, and tech is certainly no exception. If you make a bunch of predictions about what the coming year will or should bring in tech, some of your proclamations are bound to be off. It happens.
This particular list, stuffed with multiple tech predictions for 2013, caught our eye. While some of them were accurate, others were just a bit off. So which fall under the latter category? Let’s take a look.
1. Apple will make a laptop-tablet hybrid
An Apple pairing of laptop and slate makes some sense. Apple, once known for wowing the tech world with such game-changing tech as the iPhone and iPad, has more recently been making incremental upgrades. While the ability to attach a razor-thin keyboard to an iPad-like device may see the light of day in, say, 2016, that day just never came in 2013. Sure, there are a few days left in the year, but we think it’s pretty safe to say that Apple won’t be making any more big announcements this year.
2. Apple will invest in its supply chain
While it was logical to expect Apple to spend a considerable amount of time and money this year to upgrade its supply chain and ensure that 2012 iMac-like delays don’t occur again, that didn’t exactly happen. How do we know? We don’t for sure, but considering the shipping delays for the new Mac Pro desktop, which were initially set for December 30 but almost immediately bumped back to February, it’s safe to assume that whatever investment Cupertino made, if any at all, wasn’t nearly enough.
3. Chromebooks will get big
Though the concept of the Chromebook is intriguing, they never quite took off this year. They’ve also ran into problems, including melting chargers and the exorbitant price of the Chromebook Pixel (which starts at $1,299, the same price as an entry level 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina), didn’t help. To sum up the Chromebook’s failure to launch this year, here’s a line from IDC analyst Rajani Singh, which was uttered just last month.
“Chromebooks from any vendor except Samsung have not fared particularly well. Even with Samsung’s products, they’re primarily only having an impact on K-12 education in the U.S. – as a replacement for aging netbooks.”
Laying claim to the crown marked “Netbook Killer” isn’t something to be particularly proud of.
What do you think? Are there any missed 2013 tech predictions that we didn’t mention? If so, what were they? What do you think 2014 will bring to the world of tech? Sound off in the comments below.
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