It's going to be a very slow death. Still, I look forward to the day I can buy a MBP with no optical drive and an Air-sized Flash stick in place of the SSD.
In 2008, Apple removed optical drives from the MacBook Air. People concede this will extend to all their products.
The optical death will be faster than the floppy, that's for sure. I'm curious, what's next?
Just because I don't see how they could do it while still keeping it nice to type on. And of all companies, Apple seems likely to do so successfully if anyone is even capable of doing so.
And if it is possible, I want to see what the heck it would be, and who would see it coming? I mean, heck, they already went to the opposite of what people kept saying they needed on their mice / trackpads - now there's no button.
After that it's unclear.
The death of consumer-level computing where the user can actually get root? (Everything will be on a app store?)
LightPeak has the potential to replace USB, Firewire, Ethernet, and all kinds of digital A/V cables, but it can only economically replace all of them if it doesn't have to provide DC power. I really don't want Intel to screw up this opportunity by trying to make LightPeak provide power under some circumstances but not others (like USB and eSATA), or by charging silly licensing fees (like Apple did for Firewire), or by crippling the controller performance to save cost (like USB's lack of DMA or low-latency transfers).