Honestly, looking back at the predictions for things to come 2016, it feels like peering into a different dimension. We were so optimistic. Remember the hype? Everyone was obsessed with the idea that 2016 would be the "Year of VR," the year of the "Bot," and the moment the sharing economy finally grew up.
It was a pivot point.
If you look at the data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) or the feverish blog posts from early 2016, the expectations were sky-high. We weren't just looking for incremental updates to our iPhones. We were looking for a fundamental shift in how humans interact with silicon. Some of it happened. A lot of it crashed and burned in spectacular fashion.
The Virtual Reality Hype Train and the Reality Check
The big one. The massive, looming shadow over the tech landscape was virtual reality. If you followed the whispers about things to come 2016, you know that the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive were supposed to be the "television moments" of our generation. Mark Zuckerberg had bought Oculus for $2 billion a couple of years prior, and 2016 was the deadline to prove he wasn't crazy.
He wasn't crazy, but he was early.
The Rift launched in March 2016. It cost $599. That sounds cheap now, but you needed a monstrous PC to run it. The "total cost of entry" was closer to $1,500. People forget that. We saw the flashy trailers of people fighting dragons, but we didn't see the cable nests on the floor.
- Oculus Rift (March 2016)
- HTC Vive (April 2016)
- PlayStation VR (October 2016)
Sony actually did the best that year. Why? Because millions of people already had a PS4. They didn't need to build a nuclear reactor in their living room to play Batman: Arkham VR. But even then, the "VR Revolution" felt more like a slow crawl. We learned that wearing a plastic bucket on your face for three hours makes most people want to vomit. Who knew?
Actually, the doctors knew.
Medical researchers were already warning about "vergence-accommodation conflict." It’s a fancy way of saying your eyes and brain get into a fistfight because the screen is two inches from your face but the image looks ten feet away. This was one of the biggest "things to come" that actually arrived, but it arrived with a side of motion sickness.
Messaging Bots: The Future That Sorta Failed
In April 2016, at the F8 conference, Facebook (now Meta) decided that apps were dead.
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"You should be able to message a business the same way you message a friend," Zuckerberg said. The idea was that instead of downloading 50 different apps for flowers, pizza, and plane tickets, you’d just talk to a bot in Messenger.
It was a disaster.
The bots were stupid. Really stupid. You’d ask a bot for a weather update, and it would give you a recipe for clam chowder. Tech Crunch called it "the year of the bot," but by December, most people had muted every business that tried to "chat" with them. We weren't ready for AI back then—not really. We had the ambition of ChatGPT but the brainpower of a digital toaster.
The Smartphone Plateau and the Note 7 Firestorm
We also expected 2016 to be the year the smartphone reached its final, perfect form. Instead, we got the headphone jack controversy.
Apple dropped the iPhone 7. No jack. People lost their minds. "Courage," Phil Schiller called it. The internet called it a dongle nightmare. But while Apple was removing ports, Samsung was dealing with a literal fire.
The Galaxy Note 7 was supposed to be the pinnacle of things to come 2016 in the mobile space. It had an iris scanner! A curved screen! A battery that... exploded. Samsung had to recall 2.5 million units. It cost them billions. More importantly, it changed how we think about battery safety and fast-charging limits.
It was a humbling year for hardware.
We saw the "modular phone" dream die too. Remember the LG G5? You could swap out the bottom of the phone to add a better camera or a Hi-Fi audio player. Google was working on Project Ara, a phone you could build like Legos. Both failed. We realized that people don't want to build phones; they just want them to work and not catch fire in their pockets.
The Weird Rise of Pokemon GO
If you were alive and outside in July 2016, you saw it.
Thousands of people wandering into parks, staring at their phones, chasing invisible monsters. Pokemon GO wasn't just a game; it was a cultural fever dream. It proved that Augmented Reality (AR) was actually more viable than VR for the masses. You didn't need a $1,000 PC. You just needed a phone and a willingness to walk three miles to hatch an egg.
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Niantic, the developer, saw more than 500 million downloads by the end of the year. It changed retail. Suddenly, a pizza shop could pay for a "Lure" and see their sales jump 20% as teenagers swarmed the storefront.
Artificial Intelligence: AlphaGo Changes the Game
While we were playing with stickers on Snapchat, something terrifyingly impressive happened in Seoul.
Google’s DeepMind created AlphaGo. In March 2016, it took on Lee Sedol, one of the greatest Go players in history. Go is infinitely more complex than chess. There are more possible moves in a game of Go than there are atoms in the observable universe.
AlphaGo won 4-1.
Move 37. That's the one experts still talk about. The machine made a move that no human would ever make—a move that looked like a mistake but was actually a stroke of creative genius. This was the real "thing to come" that actually mattered. It was the birth of the era we are living in now. It proved that machines weren't just following rules; they were "learning" patterns we couldn't even see.
Space: The Year of the Vertical Landing
Elon Musk and SpaceX were already famous, but 2016 was the year they stopped being a "cool startup" and started being the future of aerospace.
In April, they landed a Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship in the middle of the ocean. "Of Course I Still Love You"—that was the name of the ship. Watching a skyscraper-sized piece of metal fall from space and land softly on a bobbing platform was straight out of 16-bit sci-fi.
Before 2016, rockets were trash. You used them once and threw them in the ocean. SpaceX proved that reusability was possible. This lowered the cost of getting stuff into orbit by an order of magnitude. It paved the way for Starlink and the eventual Mars ambitions we hear about every day now.
What We Got Wrong (And Right)
Looking at the predictions for things to come 2016, we missed a few things.
- The Smart Home was a mess. We thought everything would be connected. Instead, we got "smart" lightbulbs that required three different hubs and a blood sacrifice to turn on.
- Self-driving cars were "right around the corner." Tesla started shipping hardware they claimed would eventually allow full self-driving. We’re still waiting for that "eventually" to mean "now."
- The "Gig Economy" wasn't all sunshine. 2016 was the year we started seeing the cracks in the Uber/Lyft/Airbnb model. Protests, regulations, and lawsuits began to pile up. We realized that "disruption" often meant "ignoring labor laws."
Actionable Insights: Learning from 2016
If you're looking at trends today, 2016 offers a masterclass in how to spot a bubble versus a foundation.
- Watch the "Friction": VR struggled in 2016 because the friction (cables, cost, nausea) was too high. Pokemon GO succeeded because the friction was zero. If a new tech requires you to change your life completely to use it, it will take longer to adopt than you think.
- Utility over Novelty: Chatbots failed because they were novel but useless. AlphaGo succeeded because it solved a deep, complex problem. Always bet on the tech that solves a "boring" problem over the tech that provides a "cool" experience.
- Hardware is Hard: From the Note 7 to the modular LG G5, 2016 proved that physical atoms are much harder to manipulate than digital bits.
To really understand the things to come 2016, you have to look at the "Move 37" moments. The things that didn't just iterate on the past but broke the rules of what we thought was possible.
Next time you hear a tech prediction, ask yourself: Is this a "Note 7" (a forced push for a feature we don't need) or a "Falcon 9" (a fundamental shift in how the world operates)? Usually, the biggest changes are the ones that land quietly on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic, while everyone else is distracted by a headphone jack.
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Keep an eye on the infrastructure. The tools that people use to build other things are always more important than the "killer app" of the month. 2016 taught us that if you provide the platform—whether it's reusable rockets or deep-learning neural networks—the future builds itself.
Focus on the underlying shifts in computing power and energy density. Those are the only two metrics that never lie. Everything else is just marketing.