A few predictions

This list is more for fun than anything else, but I'd like to make a few predictions for what appears to be the current state of technology and where people say it is going.

Despite claims, the smart TV will never really take off, laptops will die, in-car navigation will disappear quietly, yet desktops may remain.
The thinking behind this is that laptops, car nav, and smart TVs actually can be replaced with a single device; a phone. Phones are getting more and more powerful, more constrained by battery than anything else. Once someone has the idea to stick thunderbolt in a phone, laptops will disappear; as now a phone's hardware can be extended instantly as it is snapped in to a laptop (or tablet) shell. The same will happen to in-car nav, but not for some time, as car manufacturers are always late to the party.
Desktops will remain, but likely not in their current form, probably more as media servers now that we have found ways to increase hdd size exponentially.

File explorers disappear
We've been heading there for a while now, but with the new pervasiveness of iOS, Android, the upcoming Windows 8, and desktop FTS systems I predict the emergence of a technology like elementary-os has in it's apps for sharing files with one another; iOS may never get this as the not invented here syndrome seems to influence that company more than any other despite the fact their system was almost entirely ripped from others.

GUIs will be in one language
Designers and devs are fed up with how badly GUIs are designed and the difficulties of doing so. HTML is likely to be the winner here; as it *already* has--and was built around doing--MVC from the beginning. Other features:

• easy i18n
• easy re-designs/theming; even based on screen size
• easy ways to check for correct code
• works everywhere
• thin clients possible

The Internet of Things Won't Happen

The "Internet of things" describes a future where everything is networked to the Internet, information freely flowing around and things, rather than people talking to one another. The problem with this is a complete lack of standard ways of communicating; and reason for doing so.

Perhaps if every device in a home had some API that could be accessed through a common gateway things would work, the gateway would poll all the devices, they would report what they could do, and the user would build things using them. However, there is little reason for a toaster to talk with a fridge or a temperature sensor on a research vessel somewhere in the Pacific.

Security would be a nightmare, people have a hard enough time keeping their computers up to date, less alone installing the newest Java on their blender. Any device that leaked information would allow a lot of interesting surveillance on an individual that people just don't want. Not all devices can be first-class citizens; only some should.