If you have followed my blog up till now, you must be well aware that I am a tech enthusiast who just can’t shut up about everything new (and old) in the world of technology, especially consumer electronics.

I am always on the lookout for future trends and how our habits and lives are influenced by technological progress and the devices that become available to us for use. The smartphone and the internet have been the most influential in this regard in the past decade.

If there is one thing I have learnt, it’s that technology will keep refining something until it becomes its simplest, most intimate form, that is as intuitive as using our own hands.

Today, I want to talk about how Apple is pushing us towards an era where the next big simplification will take place, involving the replacement of screens with our voices and hand gestures, as our primary mode of interface.

Making Technology Natural

We use smartphones, tablets and computers for a plethora of tasks. Too much to even count. And we interface with these powerful objects through screens (mainly). Overtime, screen technology has improved by leaps and bounds and has now gotten to a stage when it seems as real as the real world.

But the future may be one without screens at all. And we might have been given subtle hints towards that future for quite some time now. Take Apple for example.

The Apple Watch was launched as a device mainly for health and fitness enthusiasts but it also serves as your one stop shop for all your notifications. It reduces the amount of those quick looks at your phone, that turn into long ones. Now, with the latest Apple Watches, you don’t even need your phone anymore.

Next came the Apple Airpods, the wireless earphones, that let you play music, receive and make calls, and also use Siri, via which we can do a lot more. With time, it is a no brainer that we will be able to do much more powerful tasks with Airpods that will reduce the usage of phones even more.

The recently launched HomePod is also an addition to that voice controlled world where we simply use our voice to complete tasks, like controlling our homes for example.

The thing is that speaking comes naturally to us and to use it to interface with a computing device (whatever it might be), makes things a lot more simple. It’s no wonder that so many companies are working towards this direction.

It is not too far fetched to imagine a world where virtual assistants are omnipresent and we can say what we want and it will be taken care of. Pretty much like magic. That would be technology in its most non-intrusive form.

Screens won’t go away that soon. After all, there is a lot of media (movies and games for example) that is most enjoyed on screens but even those will be taken over by virtual and augmented reality, which Apple is said to be working on as well.

So, what do you think? Will screens become obsolete in the future?