Say Goodbye To Your Mouse, Your Phone Number... And What Else?!
By Ian Bush
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- We take things like phone numbers and the computer mouse for granted, but they won't be around for very long, according to one tech expert.
Avram Piltch, the online editorial director at Laptop Magazine, doesn't think his newborn son will ever dial a phone number.
"It's almost the case today," he notes. "Most of our contacts live in our cell phones where we don't even really look at the numbers."
He says we'll trade "user names" rather than digits:
"If phone numbers continue to exist, I think that at some point soon they're going to be hidden from the user, just as web site IP addresses are hidden from the user when they type a web address today."
Also on the way out, he says, could be the mouse. The next version of Windows, Piltch notes, looks very much like something you'd use on a tablet or smartphone.
"And therefore, people are going to be much happier using touch to get it, or using the trackpad to get it than they are using the mouse. The mouse gestures for Windows 8 are much more difficult to use, and so I think that is really a harbinger of things to come," he tells KYW Newsradio.
And Piltch expects the remote control to stay lost in the couch cushions, replaced by voice and gesture commands. The movie theatre, he says, could be shunned in favor of in-home, on-demand, same-day release by film studios.
But, he admits, like the fax machine, "There are a lot of things that we think today would have been gone by now, but still aren't."
See more of what's on Pilch's endangered species list at blog.laptopmag.com.
