notebooks in 2015

computerworld has an article about the personal computers in the next decade. i am underwhelmed by the conventionality of the designs shown, and the utter lack of new ideas for interaction between the user and the computer.

i don’t want to get in a chair and behind a desk only to be able to use a computer, and i am really really really tired of having to get used to yet another keyboard. and no, ridiculous pseudo-designs like this one don’t cut it.

i am hoping that in another decade we’ll have at last body-powered wearable computers, which would allow the user to project the information in the computer onto the environment — in a HUD-ly sort of way, but unobtrusively enough to be usable in the street, and finally leave hands free, being manipulated by brain waves, something akin to Ender’s subvocalising, or, at worst, eye movement.

alas, it seems the designers want to have us more of the same, at least in the next 10 years.