...and remember, the smartest people in the world (including some super-perceptive folks like Jaron Lanier) innovated in this space in the 1990s -- no one back then was able to come up with a "killer app" back then. The hardware has gotten smaller, and we have more pixels.
Are these changes fundamental improvements? Are they enough to unlock some brand-new killer app that nobody could even envision in 30 years ago?
Exactly. I think Apple is doing something fundamentally different by emphasizing AR so much that they built the hardware around it with ultra-high resolution screen and no controllers.
If something can enable that next step, I think that may be it.
But I really question if that will ever pass being a niche product. VR may just never have a popular use besides some gaming. I’m not sure AR in a headset has a big future either. Some specialty applications sure. But common?
Yeah - Excel and other 'productivity' apps are probably still the killer apps for PCs, especially for businesses. I assume businesses still drive the majority of PC purchases.
Some other factoids:
There are >1B PC gamers (source: random articles on the web). I'm guessing the number of mobile gamers is 2-3B.
There aren't that many active Excel users. Even Google sheets (free) has only a few hundred million users.
Most web browsing is now done on mobile. The transition happened sometime ~2015 for most of the world and something like 2017 for 'developer markets'.
