Many people like to make predictions. There are analysts who are right, but they tend to be those who are very close to a topic. Then there are others who simply say things hoping they will happen, and they usually don't. I think David Weston, from Microsoft, who appeared in a video a few hours ago talking about what Windows is expected to be like in 2030. What he says seems unlikely.
We're in 2025, which many of us sometimes forget and think we're in 2019 or even further back in time. I say this because that leaves us less than five years until 2030, which has so much to change. Weston He assures that keyboards will not be necessary in operating systems by 2030., and I can think of several scenarios in which they will continue to be necessary.
Microsoft is a bit like a headless rooster.
Microsoft seems a little lost nowadays. A while back, they were focusing on an operating system that most people would want to use, and that was fine. Now they're focusing on AI (Machine Learning, rather), and they're confusing people more than anything else. Take their Recall feature, for example, a privacy nightmare. And of course, since everything is AI, they have to talk about AI, and the future can only be explained with AI.
Let's think about that future operating system where the keyboard would not be necessary:
Imagining something very futuristic, yes, you could browse the Internet without any major problemsIdentifying ourselves on different services would be as simple as letting the device identify our face or iris. Clicks could be done with our eyes, and vertical and horizontal scrolling as well. Convenient and functional.
Now, Writing texts with your voice doesn't seem like a good idea to me because we are not always alone.Sometimes we have people around us we don't want to bother or we don't want them to know what we're writing. What would happen to people using their PCs on public transport? I also don't think it would be very easy to use video and/or audio editing apps with voice or eyes, not so soon.
The keyboard is essential for playing
In the world of video games, there are two types of gamers: those who prefer consoles and those who prefer PCs. There are many on both sides, but I've heard that the true gamer prefers PCs. He who plays on a computer, does so with a keyboard. Someone once asked in a group how to play first-person shooters with a controller, as they liked to use ASDW for horizontal scrolling and the mouse for vertical scrolling. There's no possible way, I believe, to change this.
Unless…
I do see a possibility, and that is that in the future it will be hybrid, like what the Huawei Matebook Fold. That is, that keyboards continue to exist even if they are not physicalA laptop would have the same V-shape, be touch-enabled, and be able to be used with a touch keyboard. That same device would see its screen size double if the keyboard is removed and placed horizontally. But the keyboard would still be optional. Furthermore, the price of this future device cannot exceed €3000.
And for other uses, it's necessary, like video games. You can't play the same without physical buttons, and that's one of the reasons why I don't use emulators on my mobile phone.
Microsoft's future will have to wait
These kinds of predictions are useless if they aren't more concrete. David Bowie predicted music streaming in 2002. Depending on the source, he said it would be something like "free and artists would earn more from concerts and other things" or that "we would pay for it as a service and the music would flow." He didn't describe music streaming as we know it, but he came close. Or Bill Gates, when he said the iPod would disappear because everything it did would be done by phones. This one from Gates is simpler, but valid.
Talking about keyboardless operating systems and saying we'll use them with voice is more of a long shot (without physical keyboards) than a long shot (with voice). Let's talk in four and a half years and see who guessed right.