Digital Toy Box: Our 2014 Smart Home Predictions, Graded

Cyber space A.K.A “digital toy box”

Kids and adults have unlimited games, devices and apps to choose from these days. In just a few years the digital toy box era has exploded into something nobody seen coming this fast. Most children’s toys today are integrated with apps or some form of online or digital interaction. This has been a great advancement into the digital age and you could describe this as a small step into the sci-fi or future we read about in comic books and seen on TV shows like the Jetson’s in the past.

What will be the next leap into the digital toy box era?

Cars will be connected to the internet opening up another Pandora’s box of possibilities.  Recently we have seen smart watches that can check your Facebook page and make phone calls. We really need a master source for data, apps, passwords, movies, pics and music. Cloud based is good but many people are still sceptical of crucial data on third party servers. Sweeping forward a private central server or a super computer hub located at home could be the host of all data for all your devices and easily synchronize everything into one integrated user experience taking out the need for third party cloud services away.

Televisions, appliances, heating and cooling systems, tablets, PVR’s and security system can all be controlled and connected to this central super computer and could be accessible remote from your mobile device,work computer etc. The sky is the limit and companies are already holding the cards to these innovations. The only thing that holds us back today is the cost for this leap forward. Making these digital advancements and keeping cost reasonable will be the magic trick for developers. Organization and security will be paramount in the future of digital technologies.

The digital toy box era has no age limits, no restrictions and no ceiling. The impossible is already just one click away. Medical, education, multi-media, entertainment and IT are going to be leading industries today and in the near future.  We are all excited to see what’s next and for the first time in history we are all on the same playing field.

Read next: Online education

Revisited in 2026: what we got right, and what we got wrong

The article above was published in July 2014 and has not been altered. This section was added in October 2026 to grade it honestly.

Right

“Cars will be connected to the internet.” Correct, and now unremarkable. Internet-connected vehicles are standard rather than premium, and the “Pandora’s box of possibilities” turned out to include the privacy and data-collection problems the phrase hints at.

A single hub controlling televisions, appliances, heating, cooling and security, reachable remotely from your phone. Correct in outcome. This is an ordinary description of a smart home in 2026, written before most people had one.

Scepticism about putting crucial data on third-party servers. Correct that it would remain a live concern. It did, and it still is.

Wrong

That the hub would be a private computer in your house, removing the need for third-party cloud services. This is the central prediction and it did not happen. The cloud won decisively. Smart homes run through Amazon, Google and Apple services, home servers stayed a hobbyist choice, and the dependency we hoped to design out became the default.

“The only thing that holds us back today is the cost.” Wrong about the obstacle. Hardware costs fell quickly. What actually delayed the connected home was incompatibility between competing ecosystems, and a common standard — Matter — did not arrive until 2022, eight years after this article.

The lesson

The forecast of what people would end up with was close to exact. The forecast of who would own it was backwards, and the obstacle we named was the wrong one. That is a common shape for technology predictions: the capability arrives roughly on schedule and the ownership goes somewhere you did not expect.

Read next: Our predictions for 2030, and how these 2014 calls held up