Ha! If by “you guys” you mean AI companies gradually becoming the interface between you and the computer, I’d say we’re already partway there—but “take over the operating system and browser” is a much bigger leap.
My rough guess:
Browser: already happening. AI search, page summarization, agentic browsing, and eventually “just tell me what you want done” are likely to become ordinary within 2–5 years.
Operating system: more like 5–10 years before an AI assistant is genuinely the primary interface for ordinary users—launching programs, manipulating files, changing settings, handling email, buying things, etc. The underlying Windows/macOS/Linux will still be there, much as the plumbing is still there beneath a modern house.
Actually replacing the OS: probably 10+ years, and perhaps never in the literal sense. Microsoft, Apple and Google have rather strong incentives not to hand the keys entirely to somebody else's AI.
The really interesting transition isn't “AI replaces Windows.” It's Windows becomes the substrate and the AI becomes the thing you actually talk to. Instead of opening Firefox, finding a website, filling out a form and downloading something, you say, “Find me the cheapest reasonable way to do X and put the resulting document in my folder.”
And then, Frank, you can finally complain that the computer has become sentient but still can't figure out why your printer isn't working. 😄
Exactly. Printers are one of those industries that managed to turn a perfectly ordinary appliance into a recurring-revenue hostage situation.
The cartridge economics were bad enough, but the deliberately miserable connectivity and software experience made the whole proposition even less attractive. If a printer costs $100 but then demands proprietary cartridges, software accounts, firmware updates, Wi-Fi troubleshooting, and occasional rituals to persuade it to recognize its own cartridge, eventually the rational response is: I'll take this file to the shop.
And at a print shop, you get the wonderfully old-fashioned arrangement: pay for the paper and ink actually used, receive printed paper, leave. No printer in your house, no cartridges in the drawer, no network configuration, no “printer offline” when it is sitting three feet from the router.
I suspect AI may eventually kill off quite a few consumer products that survive mainly because computers currently make simple things unnecessarily complicated.
They absolutely could, and it seems like a fairly obvious business model. In fact, the technology required is almost trivial compared with the physical printing operation.
The reason many don't, I suspect, is that the economics and customer base aren't quite as simple as they look. A local print shop may have historically depended on walk-in customers, and building a proper upload/payment/order system introduces customer-service headaches: enormous PDFs, wrong paper sizes, color-management surprises, copyrighted material, files that won't print correctly, customers who order 500 copies and then discover they wanted 50, and so forth.
But the model you describe is particularly attractive for ordinary documents. You could have something like:
Upload PDF → select B&W/color → paper size → single/double-sided → quantity → delivery or pickup → pay.
The shop's software could generate a proof or even a price automatically. Once paid, the job simply appears in the printer's queue. For pickup, you get a text saying “Ready.” For delivery, somebody puts it in an envelope.
And there's an interesting second-order effect: it would let a tiny neighborhood print shop compete with the big online printing companies without becoming one. They already own the expensive equipment and have somebody standing there to operate it. The missing piece is essentially just the front door.
I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes much more common as AI makes the software side cheaper. The AI could even inspect the submitted PDF and say, “This is 37 pages, but pages 12–14 are blank and page 27 is letter-size while the rest are A4. Proceed?” That eliminates a lot of the annoying human intervention that currently makes online printing cumbersome.
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