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A 45 year old scifi movie that STILL holds up! And the tech predictions were fairly accurate.

The little iPad-like devices that the astronauts use to watch the news are not as good as today's actual iPads.

For one thing, no touch screens.

Also, they have to watch them while they sit on a table in front of them.

Of course, projecting the news program on their screens as they were held on laps or propped up against something would have been far beyond the animation capabilities of that time.

I've often noted that - in some ways - the high-tech gadgets we have today are considerably better than what the SF writers of the sixties were able to visualize.

A 45 year old scifi movie that STILL holds up! And the tech predictions were fairly accurate.

I agree the movie still holds up visually, although I do find it looks a lot more dated than it did when I first saw it, in my teens, when it was 20 years old instead of nearly 50.

However, I really don't feel that the tech predictions really held up at all. Note:

When 2001 was made, NASA was a year away from landing men on the moon. I was born in 1970 so I don't have firsthand experience of the era but I know that there was a very optimistic tone about man's future in space. I don't think Kubrick and Clark could have anticipated that man would lose interest in the moon, and set foot there for the last time less than 5 years later. Hence there are no moon bases, no regular commercial flights into space, and the closest we've come to a giant floating hotel is the ISS and its rotating crew.
Now that people actually live in space for months at a time, we haven't seen the need for velcro slippers. Astonauts have adapted to living in a zero-G environment. (Mind you, I'm sure they'd probably have appreciated a centrifugal toilet if someone had actually invented one.)
The computing paradigm of 1968 was timesharing on a central mainframe. Hence Discovery is built around HAL 9000, which oversees all its operations. Kubrick and Clarke didn't see the personal-computer revolution or distributed networking coming: even on spacecraft, computing power is distributed among many smaller computers, not centralized in one big one.
HAL went online in 1992. It was optimistic in the extreme to think that he wouldn't be completely obsolete by 2001. Coincidentally I also bought my first PC in 1992. By 1996, it was too underpowered to do what I needed, and I'm pretty sure that by 2001 I couldn't even buy replacement parts for it.

They also didn't foresee the breakup of the Soviet Union, which rendered the Cold War subplot of 2001 (and 2010, for that matter!) obsolete. Nor could they have predicted that the bombing of Flight 103 over Lockerbie would ultimately lead to the demise of Pan Am, once the most prestigious airline company in the world.

We really can't fault them, though: what Kubrick and Clarke did in creating their "proverbial good science fiction movie" was intelligently extrapolate on current trends. Even when I saw it for the first time in 1988, it seemed very realistic to me.