"In short, we will carry the 2034 Mac about our person: a system/battery unit built into a belt or suchlike, a foldable screen in the pocket, the audio subsystem as an implant. High-speed mobile connectivity will of course be seamless. The last bastion of old-style computing? Probably the Qwerty keyboard: when you get to your desk, you'll probably still reach for one of those to write anything longer than an email."
William Gallagher, via Facebook: "I think there will also be a move to simplify the Mac OS: there are inconsistencies that, I think, confuse new users greatly. In that sense, PCs are much more uniform; you always know where you are with a blue screen and DOS error messages on them."
Alison Ricketts, via Facebook: "The first projector-based screen that actually works — iPod keyboard — projected on wall monitor — I'd buy one."
LJRich, via Twitter: "The 50-year Mac will be fully circular, with a built-in USB latte dispenser. It will boot on room-entry and smell faintly of jasmine."
GlennW, via Twitter: "By 50, it will be an actual apple."
Rupert Goodwins, editor, ZDNet UK: "It's wrong to do a straight-line extrapolation, so let's do it anyway. Assuming that the same rate of growth continues for the next 25 years as has for the last, we'll end up with a Macintosh with 32 terabytes of RAM; 12 petabytes of disk; a one teratransistor, 4k core processor; and OS C. By comparison, the human brain has around 100 giganeurons and between 10 and 40 terabytes of storage, depending on how you make up the numbers.
"Does that mean the Mac will have become intelligent? Probably not — although there are plenty of people who already imbue their iPhone with self-awareness. There's too much architecturally different about the human brain to make that assumption from the raw figures. But what Apple may be first to adopt is the sort of genuinely useful, almost-intelligent design that such firepower will enable. Multilingual speech IO with simultaneous translation, a voracious appetite for data from sensors, cameras and the networks to use to make suggestions, warnings and decisions about what you're doing, should be doing or might like to do.
Does that mean the Mac will have become intelligent? Probably not — although there are plenty of people who already imbue their iPhone with self-awareness
"Will there be an actual Macintosh that sits on your desk or in your pocket? If networking continues to increase along the same lines, probably not. You'll be renting cloud time from a smart infrastructure that's spread around the world, and Apple will be selling you a preconfigured chunk of service and capability. It might even come with a small ID token, a little Apple logo that identifies you as much to other people as to the system.
"So, as GlennW on Twitter says, the Macintosh at 50 may be no more or less than an actual apple. I'll bite to that."
