An Appocalyptic Tableaux: A Tale of Too Many Tablets

115 million tablets will be sold by 2014 according to the infographic below. 66.5% growth year over year.

Fascinating to think that while just about everyone (and their child) has a cell phone these days, that we’ll all soon have “x” tablets by household.

As the steady stream of upgrade/next-generation iPads arrive, year after year, expect each family to have two then three tablets lying around the house. Think of them as “media coasters.”

We’ll go from 65 apps per device to 650 apps without sweating the micro-transactions.

A peek into the Orwellian iPad-diction of society: The hand-me-down 4G generation will quickly see kids getting the short end of the digital stick; instead of a laptop, they’ll get the tablet and learn to type book reports on touch screens.

The adults will also go tablet for home use, putting much less time on their work laptops, eventually leaving them at the office. Office IT budgets will skyrocket down.

With all email and personal media (music/movies/photos) in the cloud, bluetooth keyboards and mice will fold up into the tablets for the workhorses (voiceover INPUT will be de rigueur), while most will  dialog via 140-count (and briefer) communiqués.

Shorter but more frequent individual output will be swallowed by longer and more frequent input, aka consumption. Twitter will be eclipsed by a shorter version of itself; bit.ly will become a real-time and timed-out, unique symbol.

Eventually, we’ll “share” more via links we “like” than actually sharing original ideas. Curation will become less about the “best content channels,” and more about the “opinion channels.” Colbert copycats and O’Reilly orifices.

We will become excellent navigators, able to find and sort like expert librarians. Real-time archivists.

Design will go either high end or lowest common denominator;  and UGC will go away (app-lause), replaced by immediate video chats that users can voyeuristically join, a well-ordered ChatRoulette.

We will become a world of “followers” to a select few who actually have a perspective, a voice, or else a still-working laptop or desktop.

Books and movies will be consumed as excerpts or chapters, viewed or read together in pieces. Plots will give way to interpretative navigations. Self-tuned narratives.

In short, as Twitter is currently to real-time ADD and Facebook to status OCD, the iPad will be to our hyperactive long-term memory. A media exhibitor and social (when “social” meant physical interactions) memory inhibitor.

To app or not to app, that will be the libation…