Predictions for consumer tech in 2013.

Everyone gets to make predictions at this time of year. My geek cred isn’t on the line either, as most people get New Year predictions wrong, sometimes hilariously so, like the one predicting that the internet will never catch on. So what are mine?

My first startling prediction is that 2013 will be a lot like 2012. Still no hoverboards, no replicators, and no 3DTV, at least none that I will want, or can afford to buy. I think I’ve reached a bit of middle-age spread when it comes to technology. I’ve never been one to rush out and buy the latest thing, just because it was the latest thing. I’ve always managed to convince myself that the latest thing was exactly the thing that I needed at that moment, so being an early adopter was a happy coincidence.

The difference is that now, I truly think that most of my tech is good enough. I mean, is an iPhone 5 really £600 better than my current iPhone 4? Is the gameplay on the Wii-U better in any way than my current Wii? It strikes me that much of this year’s new tech suffers from this same problem: it’s not significantly better than last year’s tech. But there are exceptions.

2013 will be the year that I will finally stop buying physical content regularly. It was vaguely depressing that as soon as we installed fancy new shelves into our new home, we discovered LoveFilm, Spotify, iTunes, Nintendo eShop and Kindle. Some of our DVDs are five years old and still in their shrink-wrap. This is the year that even the £3 CDs from Sainsbury’s will cease to be a bargain, because I can just program the same content into my playlist there and then, for no additional outlay.  And the monthly fees for these streaming services will seem like a bargain to me.

Perversely, I can confidently predict that I will spend more on physical content. The content companies have seen me coming. I’ve been accurately demographed as the type of person that loves box sets, and the more ostentatiously deluxe the box set, the better. The content companies have realised that the ownership of the thing vastly outweighs the actual content, and that people like me are prepared to pay more for fewer titles, just so long as there are fewer people who can claim the same. However, even I can see that this is the last dying grasp of an industry futilely wringing out the last drop of profit, before fading into obscure irrelevance. I just can’t help myself.

I fully expect to be wearing some form of wearable tech in 2013. I experimented with a SonyEricsson smart watch a few years back, and still love its combination of style and function. The watch lived the full tech lifecycle, from leading edge geek cred to trailing edge obscurity, within a matter of months, and is now being resurrected by a homebrew effort, so there is hope that it will be hacked to work with my iPhone by a suitably talented and dissolute programmer.

Though a smart watch is the most obvious piece of wearable tech, it’s not the only example. This year, I fully expect to be modelling a device that harvests my biodata, in the hope that measuring me will fix the bits of me that aren’t working as well as they did in 2012. I’ll worry about what to do with all that data later.

My final prediction is that I will invest in energy monitoring devices, and this time I will know what to do with the data. I will obsessively spend my free time in the evenings tracking down that last vampire device sucking down sweet, expensive electricity, and berating my increasingly disapproving family for having the temerity to leave on the single low-energy light bulb in the room.

Happy New Year!