2021 Consumer Tech Preview
2020 was a terrible year in most respects, though it pushed technology -- especially consumer technology -- to an even more central role than it held in the past. As the world hopefully returns to a place where people can connect IRL away from screens, Techsponential looks ahead to tech trends and predictions for smartphones, AR/VR, PCs, smart home tech, and televisions.
Smartphones
5G Gets Faster* (*Your Speeds May Vary) – Phones integrating Qualcomm’s latest X60 modem will bring significantly faster sub-6 5G speeds as it allows more flexibility combining frequency bands. 5G phones will dive down the price curve, even hitting prepaid. In the U.S., meaningful speed improvements will be largely confined to T-Mobile’s network in 2021 until the winners of the government’s C band spectrum auction are able to build on what they’ve bought. In the second half of 2021, if the pandemic eases, we may also start seeing real-world use cases for mmWave 5G in crowded areas and stadiums.
Focus on New Smartphone Camera Modes – Smartphone manufacturers have long tried to differentiate themselves with imaging. However, with the exception of Huawei, which uses a unique RYYB image sensor for added brightness, the playing field is largely equal: Sony supplies many of the core components and Qualcomm makes the ISP. That formula won’t change in 2021 for Android flagships, but the results might, thanks to the triple ISP in Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 888. Smartphone vendors will have new flexibility in how they implement image and video capture modes.
Form Factors Get More Interesting – While most rivals are working on their first folding, flipping, or rolling phones, Samsung is readying its third-generation foldables and promising to bring prices down. More affordable options will help clarify just how much consumers want their phones to change shape. Microsoft is also worth watching as it learns from its first-generation Surface Duo, and LG seems especially bent on experimentation. Finally, we’ll see if anyone tries to copy Apple’s iPhone 12 mini with a small premium phone of their own. Previously, only Sony had a Compact line, which it has since abandoned.
Will Geopolitics Pick Smartphone Winners? – The Obama administration first put restrictions on Huawei’s infrastructure business, but Trump expanded restrictions to include Huawei’s phone division, which originally used American software and plenty of U.S. components. As a result, any changes that the incoming Biden administration makes will have an outsized impact on the global smartphone business. The restrictions have had predictable results: without access to Google’s apps or services, Huawei has invested heavily in its own app store and workarounds to get many Android apps running. Those workarounds are not even needed inside China where Google is not part of the market, and Huawei leaned on its home market to briefly take the #1 global vendor crown earlier this year. However, if the U.S. cuts Huawei off from key components, Huawei may not be able to build phones at all. For that reason, Huawei’s budget brand, Honor, was sold to Chinese investors. As an independent company, it should have supply chain access – but it won’t have a lot of the Huawei ingredients that made its phones distinctive from other budget brands.
AR/VR
Phone-based AR Launches – Qualcomm has been heavily investing in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) functionality, and its chips can be found in nearly all the self-contained VR systems on the market. Thanks to Facebook’s Oculus Quest 2, VR is finally breaking through to the mainstream, but only as a gaming platform, and one that is a fraction of the size of Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft. AR has much broader potential, and in 2021 we will see headsets that plug into Snapdragon-based phones leave the labs and arrive on shelves. Apple has been working on its own AR glasses; if history is any guide, Apple will sit out the first round of solutions next year and define the market on its own terms later.
PC
Apple Silicon Will Continue to Draw Headlines - Apple has reportedly bought up all of TSMC’s next-generation fab capacity into 2022 as it expands its Apple Silicon M1 chips to more of its computing line. To mitigate the risk of moving to a new silicon platform, Apple has been extremely conservative with the rest of its laptop hardware and design. That should start to change in 2021 or 2022. The early transition has been successful so far, Apple and MacOS developers are working out remaining software and driver incompatibility issues, and more innovative hardware should follow.
Windows Fights Back - Windows on Arm will get a shot to make up some of the performance-per-watt delta from Apple as Microsoft improves emulation for 64-bit Windows apps and Qualcomm unveils its next generation of laptop silicon. This lower power silicon and the debut of Microsoft’s purposely stripped-down Windows 10X should add further fuel to the trend towards folding or multi-screen form factors.
Intel’s (Short Term) Problem is Capacity, Not Competition - Apple and premium/super-portable PCs only make up a small portion of the market, and even as those areas grow, Intel’s short-term challenge will be less about meeting the Arm challenge – or even the AMD challenge – and more simply fulfilling demand for improved versions of its existing product line. As offices reopen, working from home will remain an option for many. However, once past the forced changes that the pandemic wrought, companies will get more deliberate about their remote work technology, and this will include not just more ChromeOS and MacOS, but also lots and lots of Windows laptops running on Intel SoCs.
Smart Home
Alexa > CHoIP - New WiFi 6 routers are starting to arrive but require fast broadband and compatible devices to have the biggest impact, so this is a story that will develop throughout 2021 and beyond. In late 2019 Apple, Google, and Amazon got together with the Zigbee Alliance to create a new open-source standard for connected home devices; a year later they have started roping silicon vendors into the effort, but it is extremely doubtful that we will see actual devices using the standard in 2021. Instead, smart speakers remain the de facto integration point for consumer IoT, with three big areas of focus: privacy, conversation, and controlling things outside your home.
Amazon has been under pressure to improve privacy provisions of its products, and it has been responding with new options to automatically delete your history. I expect that this trend will continue – both in terms of new features, more on-device AI that requires less data to be stored in the cloud, and greater visibility to the privacy protections Amazon has actually implemented but consumers don’t know about.
The AI improvements Amazon and Google have made are impressive, but voice recognition is still too often tripped up by human syntax variation, so there’s a lot more to do to make Alexa, Google, and Siri proper conversationalists. Some of the teaching AI and turn-taking improvements Amazon announced in October will be making their way to your Echo in 2021. Apple has been quietly making progress on Siri, but it remains far behind Amazon and Google.
Alexa has been integrated into tens of thousands of devices, but Amazon is increasingly looking outside the home – on your property with Sidewalk, in your car, and embedded in wearable devices.
TVs Get Bigger, Driven by Gaming and the Pandemic – CES will see the first gigantic microLED displays marketed to extremely well-heeled consumers (already launched in Korea), but more pedestrian technology trends will continue allowing people to add huge TVs to their homes: mini-LED backlight technology, improvements to QLED, and higher yields on super-sized OLED panels that push pricing down. Streaming content channels and pandemic-broken movie theater window mean that even if vaccines curb the virus, consumer habits reinforcing watching big-budget content at home will remain.
Aside from size and improved HDR to watch streaming content that supports it, the key reason to upgrade will be gaming. It is the only source of native 8K content, and, more important for many game types, variable refresh rates. By mid-year, supply will start catching up with demand, and you’ll be actually able to buy today’s consoles and PC graphics cards. HDMI 2.1, the cabling/connection standard needed to feed ultra-high resolution content at higher refresh rates to the display, will start appearing on mid-priced TVs this year.
Apple, Please? - Finally, a prediction that is more of a fervent wish: Apple will split its Apple TV device line into budget and premium like its HomePod; both units will come with a new remote control that actually considers ergonomics.
Prediction lists like this are deliberately kept at a high-level to cover a lot of ground. To discuss the full implications of this report on your business, product, or investment strategies, contact Techsponential at avi@techsponential.com or +1 (201) 677-8284.