The Future, With 20% more Chrome

"Greetings my friends. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives." That immortal bit of dialogue opens up the 1959 B movie classic "Plan 9 From Outer Space." It's a moment of Ed Wood brilliance that came to mind the other day, as I sat on my bed and watched a live stream of Apple announcing their new products. I say “watched,” but the live stream of Apple's new product launch was not on par with their phones. After buffering kept going all over the place, I walked away from my AppleTV box, then went to the live blog on tech website Engadget.

I've been rocking an iPhone 4 for the past few years, and been quite happy with it. However, in the past few months it has begun to show its age. Naturally I was curious as to what great new miracles the tech giant had planned. Would the new iPhone have powers that might let me walk through walls? Would it be able to project a tiny hologram? Would it be able to tell me at any given point in time where Waldo is? So I read along with Engadget's live blog of all the things Apple was announcing, whilst checking my Twitter feed for the general freaking out and seat wetting that was occurring by many people who had their entire lives dedicated to the day.

Once all the hoopla over the new iPhone 6, in both it's big and bigger forms died down, Apple showed they had one more trick up their sleeve. The Apple Watch. As I looked at the first smart watch from Apple, that goes oh so nicely with an iPhone, thoughts ran through my mind. The first of which is that my friends and I would quickly disrespect this amazing technology we have, by running around and calling each other on it saying “Headquarters calling Dick Tracy! Come in Dick Tracy!”

Later that night I was on the phone with a friend, she asked if I was going to upgrade my phone, and in the process of answering we began to talk of the Apple Watch. This is when I realized something. We're kinda living in a Jetsons age. Now, stay with me here. I'm not saying we have flying cars yet, or even Hover Boards (2015 is coming soon Mattel! Don't let Marty McFly down!). Yet as I saw the new miracle watch, I marveled at it and just how thin the new iPhones are. We're living in the future. That's how I described the Apple Watch to my friend, who wasn't quite sure what to make of it. “Think of it as being the 1967 world's fair idea of what the year 2014 would be like” I told her.

Think about it, video calls on a huge screen? Say hi to Skype and big flat screen TVs. We have no Rosie the Robots, but we do have those iRoomba things. Tablet computers are something straight out of “Star Trek.” Even my computer, my aluminum decked iMac is less than three inches thick! Granted, our future is not covered head to toe in chrome as one might imagine, but if you took a 2012 model iMac back to the year 1974, they'd say it was downright futuristic. Followed by accusing you of being a witch, and seeing if you floated like churches and very small rocks do.

The great Criswell was right, we are going to spend the rest of our lives in the future. The only thing he did not see, outside of “Plan 9” not being a hit, is that this future would be filled with all kinds of super tiny gizmos and electronics. Not only can we enjoy our future, we can tweet all day long about it from the comfort of our own wrists.