With the passing of a childhood hero (Patrick Stewart) this week, it got me thinking about how Star Trek seems to be the best predictor of future technology.
So here is goes:
The iPhone's days are numbered, and Apple said so itself…
In May 2025, Apple's services chief Eddy Cue said it under oath on the witness stand in the Justice Department's antitrust case against Google: "You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now, as crazy as it sounds."
What replaces it?
Ambient computing:
Microphones, speakers, and sensors embedded in rooms, cars, and streets, linked by satellite coverage that kills dead zones, let you speak or gesture and have the room respond: messages read aloud, calls routed to the nearest speaker, shopping handled by voice. Identity follows your voiceprint. Computing dissolves into the environment, present everywhere you go.
Smart wearables:
Glasses with displays, cameras, and AI, Meta's Ray-Bans today, Jony Ive's rumoured OpenAI device tomorrow, plus a watch and camera-equipped AirPods, cover nearly everything a phone does. Messages float in your field of view, navigation overlays the street, and AI whispers answers in your ear. Add Meta's EMG neural wristband, which reads muscle signals so tiny finger movements control devices. It is non-invasive and close to shipping. The phone's screen, camera, and speaker get redistributed across your body.
Agentic AI:
The shift may be software: AI agents that book, buy, message, and negotiate on your behalf, so apps fade from daily use. Early versions are already here, handling scheduling, shopping, and customer service with minimal input. As agents get more capable, the phone becomes a dumb terminal for an intelligence that lives in the cloud, and the app-tapping interface it was built around quietly disappears.
Humanoid robots:
A robot that walks into the world and gets things done: it checks the fridge, orders groceries, takes calls, and monitors the house. Your identity and preferences live in its cloud (or local) profile, accessible from any unit. The iPhone's core job, connecting you to services, gets absorbed by an agent with hands.
Screen localization:
Why carry a screen when every surface has one? CarPlay, smart TVs, fridges, restaurant tables, and kiosks already offer displays wherever you stand. Soon your session, messages, apps, and payments, could follow you from screen to screen through face or voice authentication. AR contact lenses take this furthest, putting a display directly in your eye, invisible to everyone else, while lighter holographic displays promise a virtual workspace anywhere. And once cars drive themselves, CarPlay's logic extends: the vehicle becomes a mobile room, covering much of the day the phone currently fills.
Brain implants (further out):
Neuralink-style implants skip the screen entirely: thought becomes input, and information feeds back directly to the brain. Messages arrive as inner "speech," calls as silent conversation, all handled inside the skull. Early uses are medical, and the trajectory points to consumer implants handling communication and AI assistance at the speed of thought.
Also on the way:
Smart rings and e-textiles, skin patches absorbing the watch's health, payment, and authentication jobs.
The combination does the job: AI agents doing the work, wearables and ambient sensors providing the interface, and screens everywhere else picking up the rest.
Now think about Star Trek. The ambient computer and natural voice interaction. The screens that became “local” devices when you approach. The communicator device. The humanoid robot and the implants. Agentic everything.
Engage.
