The future of computing...
First, I'll give an "agreement" section. Everything that 2Tired has said makes a lot of sense to me when it comes to smaller and better. But one part of this, which you have touched on but not elaborated, is where I see the vision growing to - computers, PROPER floating point computers, becoming functionally the heart of a variety of consumer applications.
The Home Theater is a part of this - a computer being used as my cable box. As my DVD player. As my music player. But think of it bigger. Imagine whole households wired up to a small ATOM based server distributing content. A kitchen with a tiny ATOM board and a washable touch-screen monitor that links into the net for you to put on recipes, cooking shows, etc. A bedside table with a small mounted touchscreen to play my music or look at my email or be my alarm clock. TV with an ION board built right in to connect to my network with no box at all. Gigabit Wifi throughout the house to connect it all together without a single wire.
This extends a bit further. The treadmill we just bought has wifi to go on GoogleMaps and download real terrain likenesses (seriously, I'm not making that up). Imagine a weight machine that can program and provide workout plans FOR you. A fridge that can tell you if its temperture goes out of whack or a freezer that can say if there are items defrosting. Being able to program temperature ranges and get real-time status on how hot the oven is. Or turn it on before you get home so it's pre-heated for dinner. Lights, window blinds, etc...just look at the X10 system! We're already partway there, people just haven't seen a reason to really buy into it yet.
Where I start to get worried AND interested simultaneously is the data aspect. All these thin clients won't need their own storage, you'll just be apportioned part of the "cloud." Go anywhere and there can be small kiosks for checking email, doing your banking, etc. Plug in a USB and enter a passphrase to enjoy an encrypted desktop that isn't retained anywhere but RAM and that flash-drive. You won't need a personal computer so much as you will want a Personal Client that accesses your data and software etc, all up in the cloud.
We're reaching a point where the bigger and faster is moving towards more optimisation and efficiency. We don't keep making faster cores, we make a couple more, or improve their power efficiency or their management. Eventually we'll stop adding cores and start focusing just on efficiency for a while until we come closer to maxing out what we can do with the number of threads we produce. Even networking and load distribution is coming to this - cloud computing originated when idle datacenters wanted to make better use of their resources in downtimes. SETI and Folding make use of your processor's spare CPU cycles that you waste. As bandwidth increases, the need of each computer to do its own thing will shrink even further and consumer power requirements will melt away, to be replaced by large data clusters doing the lifting and sending a VPN-like series of screens and data to the client.
"Available" is the new bigger and "efficient" is the new faster. It'll be a great time in the next 20 years to see what we do with it. What's going to be interesting is how we're going to deal with all of the new security issues that this will create.
Anybody in computer engineering or computer science programs at uni now (or going into college in the next couple years), mark my words. Study software encryption, databases, information management, and security. That's the hot market to walk into for the next while. We're on the cusp of no longer holding the information we use, and that is a very amazing but also very dangerous transfer.
So there's my vision and $0.02. that and another $1.00 MIGHT buy you a cup of coffee at McDonalds.
