9. There will be much ado about “retina displays”
A “retina display” is a display that’s allegedly of high enough resolution that individual pixels cannot be perceived by the human eye at 30cm. Now the term itself seems to have been pretty much invented by Apple’s marketing department when the iPhone 4 came out, and the science is pretty fuzzy, but it’s still a term we’re likely to hear a lot in 2012.
The iPad 3 is rumoured to be coming with a retina display with a resolution of 2048 x 1536, and many new iPad competitors will likely follow suit – using both LCD and AMOLED technology – if Apple does release a product with a super-resolution screen.
10. Facebook will reach a billion users, but be hated more than ever
Facebook has somewhere close to 800 million users right now, and by the end of 2012 will probably have a billion users. To put that in perspective, that’s one in seven people and half of all the world’s internet users.
That being said, we expect that Facebook’s history of unrepentant privacy violations will have users turning against it and going to other services like Google+, where it’s easier to manage groups of friends.
Of those billion user accounts, how many will still be active by the end of the year, and how many will simply lie fallow, existing only because Facebook makes it notoriously hard to close an account?
Seven things that won’t happen in 2012
- You’ll still care that your TV is not 3D.
- Telephone tech support services will be made redundant by easy-to-use and setup up products
- The media starts to talk about gamers and social media users as if they’re the majority rather than some exotic sub-culture.
- All television ads will be broadcast with an unsubscribe option, selectable via the remote control.
- Big consumer electronics manufacturers decide that their patent wars just hurt everybody, and return to just trying to make the best products they can.
- Apple releases a technology that comprises of thin sheets of compressed wood cellulose onto which one can form images or words with ink. Calls it iPaper. The media goes wild over it, and Samsung tries to release its own version (but winds up in court because Apple has the patents).
- Our end of year predictions turn out to be 100% correct.
