I have a feeling that personal displays (as with cellphones now) will continue to exist until man stops existing. I imagine the opposite trend will occur, where each person owns fewer and fewer display devices. I can't imagine a justification now, or in the future, for buying some single use display. Once we get to a nice head mounted AR system, it would be very silly to have anything more.

People like having something special and permanent. All those pictures on your general-purpose computing device? They're gone as soon as you lose the device, get ransomware, and/or temporarily run out of money to renew the cloud storage subscription.

A polaroid picture that starts playing as soon as you attach it to a suitable power source (please make it something standard like an AA battery or USB cable), on the other hand, is something you can keep in a box in the attic for your grandchildren to find after you're gone. It's not just a display, it's a read-only snapshot and air-gapped backup of a moment of your life.

>A polaroid picture that starts playing as soon as you attach it to a suitable power source (please make it something standard like an AA battery or USB cable), on the other hand, is something you can keep in a box in the attic for your grandchildren to find after you're gone.

Unlikely, unless it's very carefully engineered. For example, the flash life of most microcontrollers is measured in decades.

What about not using a micro at all? Just an EPROM (burned by the camera) and a circuit to pass the image to the screen, using a clock signal to switch between images. The images would be encoded not in a regular format but essentially as a sequence of direct screen signals.

I don't think EPROM necessarily has a much longer lifetime, but I'm not sure.

Power from transparent photovoltaics printed on the same sheet. And include some kind of graphene battery inside the sheet so it can also light at night.

This is a very cool project, but if your grandchildren find some photos in the attic that they can still enjoy those are likely to be old fashioned prints.

There are many enemies of electronics: water, bumps, component failures, etc. that make long term non-specialized storage likely to fail

> All those pictures on your general-purpose computing device?

The trend is, and I believe will continue to be, not using your own memory for long term storage. It's a nearly impossible task. If you're storing anything important on a single device, be it a single use display, or a cellphone, or a memory card/disk, you will lose that data, 100% guaranteed.

We're already moving towards transparent backup of all user data. This trend will continue, because people will become more and more aware that they can't save their own data.

Your grandchildren are unlikely to be using AA batteries or USB cables.

As for AA batteries, they have been around since 1907 (though the size was not formally standardized until after WWII).

I wouldn't be surprised if they were still around in a few decades' time - there's simply too much cheap consumer electronics out there relying on AA for it to make sense to introduce a new standard. (Energy density is likely to keep increasing - but as for the form factor itself, I suspect it will outlive me.)

But both are trivial to create adapters for as long as you have a suitable source of electricity.

Unless everything (finally) goes wireless.

Even then there will need to be receivers that tap the wireless power source. To make that hard to regulate to a suitable current is exceedingly unlikely. Unless the device is extremely sensitive, if you can get any kind of electromagnetic power, converting it to electricity at a reasonable voltage might not necessarily be quick and easy if no current tech is available, but it's the kind of thing you can achieve from near first principles in the garage with some basic tools and a spool of copper wire.

But that's only necessary if you can't get hold of a source of electricity (such as a wireless receiver) and a voltage regulator of some sort (likely to exist as part of said wireless receivers).

In the past we've had problems recovering data from magnetic disks and the like, but powering ancient devices with simple power input requirements have not generally been very hard, and it's not likely to become so anytime soon unless not just every computer but every lightbulb, kettle, electrical oven and every other little appliance suddenly start receiving energy in a fundamentally different way.

how about a solar panel on the back (or a transparant one on the front). How about heat activated. How about activated by radiation in the air (microwaves).

Absolutely