After looking back on the year that was, it’s now time to look forward to the year to come. As ever, the Tame Geek website will have some specific predictions and then a bit of an outlook on what the year may bring. 

Specifics

  • The new iPhone will be announced on the week commencing the 10th of September. There will be an update to the whole line, possibly bringing the ‘notch’ to everything.
  • This same event will be the announcement of a new Apple Watch with a new form factor / size option.
  • iOS 12, the new MacOS and all the extra operating systems will be announced at the world wide developers conference on the week commencing the 4th of June.
  • At some point in the year (probably at WWDC), we’ll get new iPads, probably Pros with Face ID but perhaps not the edgeless display of the iPhone X (we can but hope that we do though).
  • We’ll also get to see the mentioned new Mac Pro, most likely at WWDC (and we may even get an Apple 5K or 8K Display).

Being a bit more vague

As for the rest of the fruit company, well, they will finish moving in to their amazing new campus and Jonny Ive will be back in to taking more of a direct role in design. That means people loosing things and some visual shake up can be expected for the operating systems.

When it comes to gaming, there’s still not going to be any sign of Half Life 3. We will however potentially see Sony hit 4 Million VR headsets sold and more VR compatible games and I’d venture a bet, the good people at Rockstar will be looking in to a GTA VR.

The Eco System War will rage on, with Apple, Amazon and Google progressing their own environments with out attacks at each other. The war however will ramp up on the platforms like face Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and the rest. The social communications platforms are fighting against dropping user engagement and political involvement whilst also look to further increase their revenues (or in Twitter’s case, have some) so that they can expand and take further control. Could 2018 be the year we finally see a giant fall? No. But some of them will be getting especially badly beaten up.

This year will bring us the next Avengers movie which is sure to hit over $2 Billion at the box office and we will have another Star Wars story at the end of the year in the shape of the Han Solo movie. 2018 looks to be a great year for the cinema patrons, but not for the management team of DC’s film department who, will most likely all be ‘strategically moved’ away from their properties and Wonder Woman can be there to pick up the slack till they have a stronger, more coherent vision for a cinematic universe. It’s harder than it sounds to do, that’s why Marvel spent the better part of a decade making one and Universal have given up after one bad movie.

In the automotive sector, the march against diesel cars will continue and unfortunately, in the UK with the lack of infrastructure needed for a fully electric road network, we’re just going to have annoyed motorists. The second season of Tame Geek video reviews will also start in January, so there’s something for you all to look forward too,

With the future of the smartphone dictated by their software and the same true of almost everything, it means that 2018 needs to be the year where software starts to tell the user how to use it. Short on-boarding and tooltips will be more important to build user engagement, but I sense this is needs to be an article in it’s own right. Until then, Happy New Year from the Tame Geek and we’ll see you later!