We live in an interesting period of technological development, the benefits of broadband and connected devices are blooming into their full strengths, after the disillusions of tech bubble. The tech bubble laid a wonderful infrastructure for broadband access, which is all set for some major overhaul. Now data centers are processing more data people 10 years ago could ever image. Enterprises and service providers are starving for faster, larger, and more flexible processing power. There is an invisible (to average consumers) evolution going on in these data centers and server rooms. Faster, more energy efficient solid state drives are replacing chunky hard disks. Their prices are fallen dramatically - I was sincerely surprised to see the price of an consumer grade 128G SSD fallen below $80 - way less than the 1$/G psychological threshold. Outside the data centers and server rooms, faster (again) optical fibers are replacing dumb and slow copper wires leading to our homes and offices. We are heading into an age of connectivity. Not only our cellphones and notebooks are "always-on", not also our homes, appliances, and everyday items.
The role of individuals has changed slightly in this age of connectivity. We were receptacles and less often hubs of information in the age of internet, searching, receiving, and perhaps passing over (during the days of social networks) information from online. Now we are becoming sources of information. Every single move, no matter online or "offline" (there is seldom true offline status anymore), are recorded, aggregated, analyzed, and then fed back to us through targeted ads, personalized medical services, or more business-oriented productive analytical services. We are no longer islands of information, we are satellites orbiting around a couple gigantic data centers.
Amazon's CEO can't be more correct in positioning Kindle Fire as a content-consuming device, as opposed to a device people "consume". In the end, the user interface and software experience, no matter how superior Apple's advantages are, can and will be replicated. People will become more "tablet-agnostic", like people are with washing machines and cars. There will be few cars and washing machines that are capable of offering truly unique experience. And even if they could, the served demographic would be negligible comparing to the mass.
In this age of connectivity, devices and their specs are becoming irrelevant faster than anyone would think. More computing powers and access capabilities (bigger pipes for information flow) are migrating to "invisible" places. Our smartphones and tablets and whatever connected gadgets are all but taps ready to utilize the massive computing and distribution powers of the cloud.
I believe the next step in consumer devices would be a general sharp decline in price, whereas specs remains constant, enough spec to provide reasonable connections and computation.
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