You Asked:

What will computers in 2020 be like? — Margaret, Holland, Texas

Marshall Brain Answers:

It’s hard to predict the future, because you never know what will “come out of the blue”. But desktop computers haven’t changed much since the IBM PC and Mac came out in the early 1980s, and laptops are pretty much unchanged as well. You have a CPU, memory, long term storage (hard disk), a screen, a keyboard and a pointing device.

One thing that has been constant over the last half-century is Moore’s law, which says that capacity/performance doubles every two years or so. Assuming that trend continues through 2020, we can look at a typical laptop today and see where we are heading. A typical laptop today has a 2-core processor running at 2 GHz or so, 2 gigabytes of RAM and a 200 gigabyte hard drive. By 2020 we would expect things to double 5 times, so a typical laptop would have:
1) A 64-core processor? Or maybe a 32 core processor running at 4 GHz. Something like that.
2) 64 gigabytes of RAM
3) 6.4 terabytes of disk space.

The disk will likely be made of flash memory or one of the new technologies being discussed today rather than spinning platters. Memristors, racetrack memory or Phase change memory are possibilities, or something else entirely.

Disks today hook to the computer using SATA. Chances are that SATA will be replaced with Light Peak, which is 3 times faster, and then by 2020 Light Peak will be replaced by something better still.

The screen technology could be something new like a TMOS screen or OLEDs.

The traditional mouse has been with us for 30 years, and is in the process right now of being revamped with multi-touch capabilities. Here are three possibilities for the future:
1) The new Apple Magic Mouse
2) The multi-touch mouse
3) An attempt to radically redefine your computer’s user interface

And then there’s the keyboard. It’s been around for nearly 200 years, largely unchanged. Will it ever be replaced by voice recognition technology? It seems like 64 cores and 64 gigabytes of RAM would provide more than enough horsepower to handle robust speech recognition and make the keyboard obsolete. Here’s where speech technology is today:

By 2020, perhaps speech recognition technology advances enough to eliminate the keyboard. Or perhaps some sort of brain interface gains traction.