Just saw this mockup of a see-through iPad concept and I think something along those lines really could 'work' in terms of being next-gen and groundbreaking in a similar way to the iPhone. It's not exactly a new form factor necessarily, but I think that something approaching that level of seamlessness and minimalism is inevitable and until we get to that point, we probably won't see the next wholly different form factor.
http://designtaxi.com/news/355781/A-...h-iPad-Design/
Other than that, Wearable computing does, I think, have a real chance at taking off in the next 10 years. I personally think Google Glass is kind of dumb, I think smart watches are kind of dumb, but that's maybe because the tech isn't quite 'there yet' to make them disruptive and special. I mean, I used to think the tablet form factor was pretty dumb back in the "Tablet PC" days and now I am thinking of getting a
second iPad because of how much I love the form factor. You do look like a dork wearing bluetooths, and while people use watches as fashion accessories, I think it's unlikely a consumer smart watch would ever be considered 'designer' in that regard so you'd probably look dorky with it as well. Google Glass of course looks even dorkier. But maybe that's just something we 'get over' as a society. Glasses are probably at one of their 'coolest' points, aesthetically, right now. To where even people who don't need them regularly wear them as a fashion thing, and while that's never happened with bluetooth headsets, that could just be a 'before its time' sort of thing. I mean, arguably staring at your phone all the time is just as dorky as wearing a bluetooth but we don't even question that.
In a science fiction sense, I would like to believe that Sci-fi style holograms that float in air and are able to be interacted with in a quasi-physical manner is an actual possibility. Something like Tony Stark's lab in the Iron Man/Avengers movies. But that just seems like it's asking too much and would be actual magic to make it work. Still, if that was at all possible, I think it would come to dominate all consumer electronics where the 'device' would basically stop existing in a purely physical sense. I guess, in some respects Kinect technology is trying to address this concept, and maybe that's possible in a controlled setting.
Another sci-fi reference point that comes to mind is Cloud Atlas (movie version) where characters in the future sequences are seen using handheld devices(Samsungs actually, though in the book they are referred as Sonys) that generate numerous floating displays in mid air that can be used for anything. Again, probably pure magic, but the point between both those sci-fi examples is that I think the 'goal' of the next form factor whatever it is, will likely be towards removing as much of the 'device' as possible. Similar to how the iPhone was so starkly minimalist compared to smartphones of its day and it became a "the software makes the device", well, what if the next step is figuring out how to make the hardware as flexible and impermanent as the software is today.
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Let's just begin with noting that Apple does not come up with revolutionary products, but merely perfects existing products and wipe out the earlier implementations of said products.
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I would quibble with this a little. I think it is fair to say that Apple does come up with revolutionary products. The distinction is that they don't usually come up with revolutionary technologies. With Apple it's usually that they take existing
technologies and
make products out of them. With the iPhone for instance, there were plenty of phones that had touch control to some degree or another, as well as labs and proofs of concept for multitouch, but no singular
product that an end-user could actually buy existed that was anything like the iPhone's total package at all. Similar with the iPod. PMPs existed, some with high capacity that were themselves very large, some that were pocketable but had small capacity, but they all had crappy software and interfaces and even worse computer-side software. Apple made a cohesive product out of it that started with the high capacity pocketable player and extended to good computer-side software(and eventually the store). Comparatively, everything else at the time was just a random sampling of ideas and functions.