Future Retro

What goes trough your mind when you think of retro technology? If you're a game type of guy/girl maybe Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, Gameboy or even Spectrum. If not, maybe that old Pentium 300MHz or Apple III. In the future those will be antiques and not retroware.

So, what will be retro in the future? Well, we can think of the game console and computer equivalents of nowadays, but those are only updates to the old SNES and Pentium 300's. They are nothing new, just more powerful, faster and better machines than the grandfathers of technology.

In the home computing universe PCs and MACs give us a huge amount of data management power and versatility. In the gaming universe, the magic was lost. Games leave less and less to the imagination and we find ourselves wanting more realism and feel other than originality and fantasy.

The future of retroware lies in what will bring us back to the past when we find a dusty one in the attic or basement. Those being, in my opinion, Laptops, Mobile Phones with physical keyboard, Mice and Printers.

This is why it makes sense to me:

Laptops and keyboarded mobile phones will be gone for the same reason. Laptops are giving room to tablets and are getting smaller and smaller, as mobile phones are getting touchscreens and more powerful. These two will meet at some point in a blend that will integrate portability, communication capabilities and processing power.

That $200 Logitech ergonomic mouse with 2500 dpi that promises to headshot every CS noob with one of its 10 programmable buttons will be gone. It needs a surface to work on and is (glup...) wired or (double glup...) battery powered. That doesn't look like a big problem, right? Right, because you expect it to need a surface and be wired or battery powered. Now imagine (humor me on this) that you don't need a mouse to point and click, that your computer knows where you are looking at and when you intend to click. Now imagine you have to use a mouse again. Plug it in or charge it, click a different button to do different things and move the cursor all the way from point A to point B. That sounds like going backwards, right?

With the slow but existing developments in electronic paper and the miniaturization of technology, printers are getting less and less use. Except in offices and businesses, printers are starting to get dusty as we are increasingly able to transfer content between devices and read it/listen to/watch it on-the-go.

What about gaming?

Well, gaming is just that. A game. Why do you win at TicTacToe with three X's/O's in a row? Because you believe that to be the rule that says you win. Today games show us everything in detail and look more and more like the real deal. Now, I don't know about you, but when i feel like taking a break from real life I play games and believe me, I want them to be everything except real.