When WiGig gets here (early 2013-2014), then the dumb USB cables all over the house can be done away with. Good riddance. We'll still have to power everything somehow though, which brings me to the point: houses suck at adapting to new technologies.
In the stone ages, we had coaxial cabling jankily strewn around the house from a splitter so that all of my sisters and mom could each watch TV in their room. In slightly more recent times, cat6 cables were also needed for networking (then quickly replaced by wifi). In college, we hated the slowness of wifi, so we were back to cat6 briefly, but then wifi got faster. Now I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to get music to play in all the rooms of my house at once and frowning about drilling holes and running wires. And I still haven't even gotten to running an antenna cable onto the roof for my radios.
Sure, WiGig might make some of this unnecessary, but I'll still have to power all of those speakers and amplifiers, and all that cabling will probably be in the way once again. Furthermore, all these things need bulky AC-DC transformers, which take up space, look like shit, and are more crap to have lying around and break when we get new gizmos.
Working in the lab and on ships, we have overhead cable trays, and false floors so that we can easily run cables where we need them, and keep them the hell out of the way. The idea of a tray system for running cabling is old news in these places, so why hasn't it gotten into our houses yet?! Maybe people don't want some unsightly tray of cables in every room, and they enjoy the resulting tangle of trying to adapt, but I would guess that there just isn't a good standard solution yet.
When I build my house, there will be room for cable access hidden behind the moulding along the ceiling and floors connecting every room in the house so that it's easier to adapt my house to future adjusting wired needs. I'll also put outlets under the moulding and enough space to cram those stupid transformers out of sight.
It would be pretty cool to do away with the transformers entirely and just plug into 12VDC instead of 120VAC all the time. Sure the voltage and AC are great for power appliances, but most consumer electronics these days just need 5-12V anyway. My old laptop had a 15V power supply and just a 10V battery, and it worked fine hooked up to my car's 12V battery, and so does my radio, and most of my other electronics. My house will have a central 12VDC supply run with outlets along with the 120VAC, so that I can get rid of all those transformers. Standardizing connectors might be a pain in the ass, but when it catches on everyone will be happy about it.
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