Fireworks against the night sky

It’s that time of year again where bloggers, pundits, professionals, and anyone who wants to be able to say, “told ya so” in 12 months time makes predictions for what’s going to happen over the course of the next year.

2022 was been a weird year - although not as odd as the lost pandemic years which preceded it. Here’s what the Crow thinks is going happen in 2023…

More phone manufacturers will fold - in both senses

The mobile phone market is utterly saturated to the point where even budget phones do anything you could possibly ask of them, and manufacturers are constantly trying to find ways of differentiating their black slab from every other black slab. These useful gimmicks are being advertised as flagship features, but really, are they that big a deal.

The ones which are useful will find their way into the rest of the phone market. By this we mean features like Apple’s emergency satellite distress call, or maybe the Nothing phone’s back panel lights. We also think that the technology behind folding phones is getting to the point where a winner is in sight, and the technology behind it will be licensed out to evryone else. There will be more folding phones in general use starting in 2023. Competition to innovate and drive sales will also put a good proportion of Vendors out of business.

Twitter will stagger on under Elon Musk

Elon Musk cartoon against a background of blue birds

We’re not going to recap the entire Musk /Twitter shitshow. You’ve already had enough of that forced down your throat over the past year. We’re going to reiterate the point we made in May: That Twitter is the United States of the Internet, and (the vast majority of)citizens won’t leave no matter who’s in charge. He may or may not appoint a new CEO. It still won’t make any money.

So many more data breaches

an open padlock

We saw a lot of data breaches last year. Thieves made off with about $30 million from Crypto.com in January, and there have been a whole load of account information been either stolen or lost through carelessness. Some notable lapses include 69 million Neopets accounts compronmised in July, details for more than 400 million Twitter accounts going up for sale in December, The LastPass vaults fiasco, The epic Samsung data breach, and so many more than we care to list here.

2023 will be worse.

Fediverse everywhere

Although Musk’s Twitter will carry on as the leader of the microblogging platforms, the Fediverse, and Mastodon servers in particular will continue to proliferate. MAgazines and news outlets will have their own instances where the wider ‘verse can interact with writers and editors. Businesses will have a primary social media server in the Fediverse, too. Just look at the now notorious Raspberry Pi Official account. A single figure percentage of normies will have a secondary account on one of the big instances.

Raspberry Pi 5 announced

a raspberry pi

The Raspberry Pi has come a long way since it was introduced as a low power, low cost single board computer. The Pi 4 is a powerful beast indeed, and in addition to serving this site, also hosts an absolute shit-tonne of web facing services. Another 4B, is permanently powered up as an emulation station attached to the 72 inch TV in the Crow’s nest, and providing 24/7 retro console games on everything from the megadrive to the N64. Lower powered Picos and Zeros are closer to the original Pi vision. The Crow believes we’ll be getting an idea of the Raspberry Pi 5 in 2023, which departs even further from the low power & low cost ideal. Price point will be upwards of $100.

How the Crow’s predictions for 2022 panned out

At the start of 2022, The Crow used his all-seeing eyes to make three predictions. Some were better than others:

NFTs will become worthless

The Crow’s exact words were, “NFTs are going to experience an Emperor’s New Clothes moment.”

Prediction validity 8/10

Year of the Linux desktop!

Sort of right. Linux is now the most popular OS among software developers, so that’s something. Right?

Prediction validity 5/10

Search engines will be even less useful

We’re going to give ourselves a middling mark on that one.

Prediction validity 4/10

Have a great 2023

Hopefully, 2022 was, for you, significatly better than 2021, and 2023 will be even better than 2022. Remember: Klingons do not procrastinate. It is a tactical delay.