Honestly, what could be the NBT in consumer tech ? I feel we reached cultural and ontological plateau in most areas. If there's a next it probably won't be a big thing.
1. things which would clearly be useful, but couldn't be made yet or which cost too much to be practical. Example: flying cars, tablet computers.
2. things that could be done easily with current technology but hadn't been tried yet. Examples: Uber, Twitter.
A useful subclass of #2 is things which are known to be useful and have just become or are just about to become makeable. A good example is the Motorola Star-Tac, the first flip phone. It's a Star Trek communicator, made real.
Apple is good in that space. The Macintosh was of that type. Good UNIX workstations already existed, as did the Alto and Dorado, they just cost too much. The original 1984 Mac was a severely cost-reduced workstation - tiny screen, no hard drive, floppy disk storage only. It took a few more years to get a hard drive into the product, at which point it became useful.
The iPod was also in that space. It wasn't the first MP3 player. The iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, although it was the first to get rid of the keyboard.
So that's where Apple innovates - at the leading edge of what's commercially possible. They don't do long-term efforts to make a technology work, as RCA did with color TV and IBM did with computers.
Home automation/IoT is still a thing that could be it. And I'm honestly surprised Apple hasn't been more aggressive with HomeKit etc. With more and more crappy IoT devices, Apple coming out with a reliable and well-integrated platform could be great. I don't have Apple stuff, but the people I know that do often cite good integration between everything as a reason, so I think that angle might work.
They have voice control tech, they have end devices in all important form factors (TV, tablets, phones, watch), they have customers that like everything being tied together.
Only issue is that I'm not sure if they could do it with external partners making most of the devices (how do you guarantee quality to people? Premium home IoT is scarce for now), and making everything themselves would be a lot of different pieces to make.
Unless i can turn my house into my own butler, that will ready the table for me etc, IoT is effectively dead. Because flipping switches etc can be done as i walk around anyways. And walking around i need to do to prepare and put away things anyways.
The next really big thing will be consumer robotics, powered by advances in AI. It's still a ways off. Self-driving cars may be the first big application area. After that we'll see home robots to do cleaning, cooking, and maintenance.
Contrary to popular opinion, IoT is a dead end. The future isn't a million devices scattered around your home, but one capable robot that can be your servant and do everything for you.
You people need to stop saying this kind of stuff. I will bet you $1k on longbets.org that we do not have fully autonomous vehicles operating on public streets in 9 years (i.e. 2025). These types of statements are confusing the non-technical 'tech press' and they are misinforming the public.
The way you worded it, I'd say we have that already: See Google's relatively public self-driving car project, already logging lots of fully autonomous miles on public streets https://youtu.be/bDOnn0-4Nq8
I do think it'll be more like 50 years to get self-driving cars being sold to the general public that can drive autonomously anywhere though.
"fully autonomous" requires no human intervention method, IMO. Google's cars have steering wheels. The gist of what I am trying to communicate is that serious disruption to the status quo will not happen from autonomous cars in my lifetime (one can quibble with specifics and lawyer the discussion at will).
"Digi-Capital cut its rather optimistic forecast for spending on virtual and augmented reality in 2020 to $120 billion, down from an earlier forecast of $150 billion." - http://fortune.com/2016/07/05/virtual-reality-htc-sales/
I'm sure there will be a next Next Big Thing. I'm also sure that nobody here knows what it is. If you do, tell your stock broker instead of Hacker News, and become a billionaire if you're right. That's what makes geniuses geniuses - going all-in on the right thing at the right time.
People in the 1890s and 1690s and so on probably thought they were plateaued on things too. What are the odds that we're the real plateau? It might not be in consumer tech, but it's out there, waiting for the right person to discover it.
I feel wearables - IoT could be the next big thing (...who isn't saying this...).
Putting privacy concerns aside, imagine having contact lenses + voice and/or gesture control augmenting your life. Combine that with real-time health monitoring, all powered by your blood glucose.
That's hinging on still quite a lot of big technologies delivering and becoming mass-consumerable, but that is one way in which I can see technology and connectivity being taken to the next level in a similar sense that smartphones did.
Note: I am not particularly pro IoT nor wearables, but can see this becoming a thing in the future.
Agreed with ufmace. It's more likely than not that the NBT is something nobody on this thread has mentioned. History proves this point over and over again - smartphones were not the clear NBT in 2006, social media wasn't the NBT in 2003, the sharing economy wasn't the NBT in 2009, etc. etc.
The one area where people's opinions did get the NBT right was probably in 2013, where the NBT was predicted to be enterprise.
1. things which would clearly be useful, but couldn't be made yet or which cost too much to be practical. Example: flying cars, tablet computers.
2. things that could be done easily with current technology but hadn't been tried yet. Examples: Uber, Twitter.
A useful subclass of #2 is things which are known to be useful and have just become or are just about to become makeable. A good example is the Motorola Star-Tac, the first flip phone. It's a Star Trek communicator, made real.
Apple is good in that space. The Macintosh was of that type. Good UNIX workstations already existed, as did the Alto and Dorado, they just cost too much. The original 1984 Mac was a severely cost-reduced workstation - tiny screen, no hard drive, floppy disk storage only. It took a few more years to get a hard drive into the product, at which point it became useful.
The iPod was also in that space. It wasn't the first MP3 player. The iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, although it was the first to get rid of the keyboard.
So that's where Apple innovates - at the leading edge of what's commercially possible. They don't do long-term efforts to make a technology work, as RCA did with color TV and IBM did with computers.