Tech trends for 2019: foldable phones, 5G, cashierless retail, privacy legislation, autonomous delivery wagons, IoT edge computing, and more
From delivery wagons and foldable phones to privacy crackdowns and corporate health tracking, the coming year will make good on some of the tech industry's biggest promises Tweets: @lars_ruud , @yunheekim22 , @djg_media , @msquinn , and @priyankamogul Tweets: Lars Erik Ruud / @lars_ruud : The new year will bring 5G to more places, enabling AI to move from the cloud to cores..making it even more useful for all of us. And maybe Alexa will learn norwegian...? https://www.wsj.com/... Yun-Hee Kim / @yunheekim22 : Tech trends to watch in 2019: 5G, foldable phones, an epic streaming service from Disney, cashier-less stores and a new look for iPhones @JoannaStern @pierce https://www.wsj.com/... David Grover / @djg_media : The new year will bring foldable phones, an epic streaming service from Disney, cashier-less stores and a new look for iPhones https://buff.ly/2EW7ktE pic.twitter.com/F7byhOsnHG Megan Quinn / @msquinn : “Thought Pokémon Go was big? Wait until Niantic, the company behind the augmented-reality gaming phenomenon, releases its next project, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite...it's likely to be unmissable.” Let's go @NianticLabs! http://www.wsj.com/... Priyanka Mogul / @priyankamogul : “From delivery wagons and foldable phones to privacy crackdowns and corporate health tracking, the coming year will make good on some of the #tech industry's biggest promises.” Via @JoannaStern and @pierce. https://www.wsj.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This WSJ roundup lands right after Mary Meeker's 2018 internet trends report showed smartphone shipments stagnating, which is why the 2019 list leans so hard on new form factors and networks — foldable phones, 5G, autonomous delivery wagons — as the next growth engines. It also flags a regulatory track: privacy legislation and scrutiny of corporate health tracking.
The corpus lets us check the list against outcomes: the year-end retrospective of 2019 describes a year dominated by antitrust investigations and consumer protests against big companies, suggesting the privacy-crackdown prediction was the one that stuck. And the format itself proved durable, returning in the 2023 predictions edition with Apple's headset and generative AI in place of foldables.
First-order effects
- Disney's expected streaming launch moves it from content licensor to direct competitor with established subscription services, while retailers trialing cashierless stores and delivery-wagon pilots put automation in front of shoppers and regulators this year.
- Companies running data-hungry practices — including workplace health tracking, which the report explicitly flags for privacy scrutiny — face a tightening legislative landscape in 2019.
Second-order effects
- If 5G expands as forecast and pushes AI from the cloud onto devices at the edge, cloud-centric providers face pressure to reposition, and hardware makers gain a new spec war beyond the stagnant smartphone market Meeker documented.
- Cashierless retail and autonomous delivery force traditional grocers and logistics firms to match automated checkout and last-mile experiments or cede the convenience advantage.
Third-order effects
- The year-end account of 2019 — antitrust investigations, consumer protests, tough startup IPOs — indicates the predicted privacy crackdown matured into structural regulatory pressure on Big Tech rather than staying a compliance footnote.
- The recurrence of these annual lists through the 2023 editions points to prediction roundups functioning as an industry agenda-setting ritual, with each cycle swapping last year's hardware bets (foldables, wagons) for the next (headsets, generative AI).
The trend: Annual tech-forecast cycles are tracking the industry's pivot from squeezing growth out of saturated smartphones toward new form factors, edge networks, and intensifying regulation of data practices.