I’ve found myself taking notice over the last couple of days – especially with the purchase of our new car – just how seamless some of my favorite technologies are becoming around us, and I kind of like it.
For example in the car – the brand new car that we got just before going on vacation last week is the first car I’ve had with Bluetooth, plus it came with those cool keyless entry key fobs so the car can be started with the push of a button as long as the key is present, meaning that all I have to do is toss my phone and keys in the center console and when I start the car, it automatically re-pairs my phone and connects to Pandora or whatever music I was playing before.
Or with my media collection, now spanning music, movies, and TV Shows – not only can everything play on any device around the house via a simple Plex app, even when we’re out and about I can placate the child with Fraggle Rock or Mickey Mouse Clubhouse that streams to my laptop from our media server back home – all with just a wifi connection.
Even simply with my working space on my computer – a decade ago I had my laptop, and then I had a separate desktop that had some of my beefier apps that wouldn’t run on my laptop, and I would keep my writing and other critical files on a flash drive that I’d shuffle between wherever I was working at the time. Now I just have a MacBook Air that serves as both, and for the first time in forever all of my stuff is properly backed up multiple times to the cloud and my own personal server automatically.
Despite occasional reminders of how dependent we’re becoming on connectivity – such as when I was sitting in iHOP just outside of Disney yesterday and Verizon couldn’t feed me a signal to tweet to save their skulls – I love to see the direction that some of my favorite tech is coming where it’s more and more a common, integrated part of our daily lives without the struggle that came from playing computers a decade ago … building servers that kind of worked, directories of mp3s being a media server, and who can forget those god awful CD-to-cassette adapters that we used to use to pump our brand new CDs into our cars on the go?!
It makes me feel more optimistic for something like NFC, which I didn’t really see the appeal of a few years ago, now that I’ve been using Apple Pay more actively to the point where I get frustrated with retailers that are stubbornly refusing to accept it. Back then when they talked about paying things with just my cell phone, it sounded like a stupid idea that would never take off, and then I got an iPhone and slowly our phones grew more and more from just personal communicators into the ultimate portable computer that we know today.
It makes me wonder if 10 years from now I’ll be ready to truly embrace the automated home that’s been preached at us for years to give us the ability to turn our lights on and off from anywhere in the world, if there was ever a reason that we might actually need to do that. I can already see the appeal for the same keyless entry that my car has extending to my front door, and you can buy a new doorknob that does that today! I think the next steps to continue bridging our devices – cameras, phones, tablets, PCs – are going to warm even more people up to the idea, so who knows what’ll be available in a few years when I’m ready to build my brand new dream house of my own – it’s starting to make that home of the future from the Carousel of Progress sound not just more attainable than ever, but more importantly more desirable than ever, too.
Hey, it’s a great big beautiful tomorrow! 😀