2026

Happy New Year! I hope you and your families will have an amazing 2026. Be healthy, be happy and achieve all the goals you set yourself!

Let us kick the year off with a short list of random predictions for 2026. Because telling me in a year that I am stupid and got all of them wrong is far more fun than me writing about things that happened a year ago and that you already know about. These are in no particular order and I will keep them very short to the point. Many of them deserve and will get their own long form post.

Hardware prices will likely continue to climb and even if the whole AI bubble would burst over night and all companies burn down I do not think the prices will come down to where they were. After all we are establishing new baseline pricing for companies seeking profit.

Apple will either continue to replace leadership (hopefully Tim Apple as well) and start focusing on customer needs again or become far less relevant in the coming years. Liquid Glass - no matter how much you dislike it - was objectively a disaster. Their hardware innovation is a new camera for the last few years and a tone deaf bendable phone (that was not meant to bend). AI is in such a bad state you might be able to build a better version with freely available models and some glue code if your data is available in standardized formats.

Linux on the desktop will see a significant increase in market share but not replace Windows. People are getting upset with CoPilot 11. Bazzite is a proper replacement for gaming. Triple AAA titles work. Valve is pushing hard with their new ARM based VR headset playing standard steam games and the SteamBox. A device that could not come at a worse time. We know it will not be price competitive to consoles. With memory prices increasing it will not be competitive, period.

The gaming industry will continue to use more and more AI based tools, get backlash from some and money from those who do not care. Depending on how much the market share increases we might actually see one or two studios officially support Linux for AAA titles - with that I mean they test their builds on Proton and do choose an anti cheat software that works on it. I do not expect native builds and have to admit I do not care. Proton is a fine compromise and it works well.

AI will divide people even more. Some love it, some hate it, some are indifferent. But the first two camps will be very vocal about it. I still believe we are in a bubble, but it will not burst yet -it will continue to inflate. There is value to be extracted from LLM based tools. But it will not replace people, it will be an auto correct on steroids that forces you to do more work in different areas like code reviews and system architecture. It is different work, not necessarily less. At least for long term maintainable code, I do not care about showcases of vibe coded one off scripts to download a YouTube video. The ethics conversation is over, the morally wrong side won. Legislation might still get in the way.

Foldable phones will cannibalize the tablet market (except for Apple). The new Samsung TriFold is everything I would want in a foldable phone except the thickness when folded. But it is a tablet in your pocket. Apple’s foldable would eat into the iPad space, especially the Mini, but they will castrate the software the same they do with iPadOS to make it not a real alternative.

Gaming consoles will not be announced before hardware prices fall which is predicted to be 2027 or 2028. Memory alone costs more than a Playstation 5 at the moment. You cannot produce a console at 200% loss hoping to subsidize it with games. There is a limit to this calculation. And people will not spend $1500 on a console. So the current generation will likely have to hold up for a few years, which is fine considering the reserves they got no one tapped into properly. Witcher 4 demo is all I am saying - also I want Witcher 4. Microsoft will triple down on game streaming instead and fail. The Xbox brand will continue to be watered down and slowly fade from relevancy - this one will take longer than a year but I believe we will see the beginnings.

Well then, you know how to reach me in a year to tell me how obviously wrong I was. In the meantime enjoy an amazing year! Let us make the best out of it!