I've been having the same thought lately. I feel like consumer tech has stagnated since the early 2010s. I miss watching announcements each summer as companies announced their new products and new features, and introducing literal new ways of life.

These days, there's nothing new anymore. This year's phone is the same as last year's and the year before that, except now it has more AI. This year's game console is the same as the last one, but now it has even more restrictions on game ownership. This year's car is the same as last year, but now it has a monthly subscription for power steering.

It’s a plateau. Current tools are good enough and we don’t have the technology to do anything significantly better. Apple tried with this silly AR/VR headset and failed. They really put state of the art tech in it and it still wasn’t better then normal laptop. Couple startups tried the AI assistant type tools and also failed. I think the next leap will be some brain-computer interfaces but those are probably decades away.

Apple’s headset wasn’t really innovative in any way that mattered. It was just a bad VR headset that meant it was only really suitable for AR.

As always, Apple waited until the tech matured and tried doing it the right way. It wasn’t innovative but it was the best thing you can make at a price consumes can still afford.

You think consumers can afford an Apple headset? I’d argue one of the reasons it failed is that it was completely unaffordable.

It was on the verge of affordability. Definitely not something average consumer would buy but definitely achievable for the upper-middle class. I was also aimed at professionals and if a device can you help do your work faster it’s a great investment. The problem was it didn’t let people work faster because despite all the tech it still sucked.