The iPhone, breathtakingly ahead of its time, will change the PC world forever, according to Mike Elgan at Computerworld on Friday. Displays will be angled for touch screen use and the mouse will be distant memory.

Mr. Elgan recounted the innovative features of the iPhone and how those features, multitouch, gestures, physics, 3-D and minimal icons, will percolate into the PC interface.

"Next-generation user interfaces will have no use for a mouse. All that dragging and dropping, pointing and clicking, resizing and moving will be done directly with fingers touching the screen. Mice will go the way of the floppy disk, never to be seen again," Mr. Elgan wrote.

"Because these display-centric PCs will be so large, and every square inch of those screens will need to be reached by the user’s hands, future monitors will be like drafting tables used at an angle," he continued. "The bottom of the screen will be waist high, and the tops chin-high, or something like that. They’ll be capable of swiveling to vertical so they can be used for presentations or as a TV, or horizontal, for use as a physical desk. You’ll be able to place books or reports side-by-side with on-screen documents."

Mr. Elgan went on to describe how the change in UI metaphor will also affect laptops in a reasonable extrapolation of current changes in thinking by Apple.

"If you accept the inevitability of the next-generation interface — the UI with advanced versions of iPhone’s multitouch, gestures, physics, 3-D and diminished role of symbolic representation (icons) — then all the rest follows," the author noted and pointed out, " that’s the direction we’re going. And iPhone got there first."

One item that wasn’t mentioned was just exactly how new Apple patents, not software copyrights of the past, will translate into an advantage for Apple Macintosh UI compared to the PCs of the future. That process will take many years to sort itself out.