Wearable devices are on the rise now, but their popularity could wane quickly.
Forrester vice-president and principal analyst James McQuivey predicts that, by 2016, their functionality will be absorbed by other devices, such as smartphones and sensor-laden headphones.
This could be a possible reason that Apple acquired Beats.
The digital era has witnessed the ascent and decline of a number of new devices: the PDA, the digital camera, and the MP3 player have all risen to prominence only to collapse into specialty niches in a way that prior generations of technology did not, McQuivey says.
He cites the example of the e-reader: more than 25-million people in the US owned e-readers in 2012, just five years after Amazon released the original Kindle.
However, the device’s fall is set to be just as pronounced and rapid. According to data from Forrester’s World E-reader and E-book Forecast, US users will drop to a mere 7-million users by year-end 2017.
A new report from Forrester illustrates how digital has disrupted device life cycles and fundamentally changed the rules of “rise and fall.” In it, McQuivey also predicts the rise and fall of home automation and control, virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D printing and drones.
