They never pulled an iPhone out of those deep pockets. You can be sure an iPhone is in most of them today. You still have a hard time comparing a HUD built for a fighter pilot in a F-35 with an AR device built for a digital work and life-style. Keep your knobs and switches, give up a couple displays. I'm no technophile, I think there's a greater movement towards real-world experiences coming, but I think AR will be more and more common for work and entertainment.
here's Vannavar Bush describing an iPad in 1945. Again, speaking as a CAD monkey, I first used a Digitizer in 1988. UI for design predates UI for anything else; the digitizer was available before the mouse, but wasn't as widely adopted. A mouse is basically a digitizer with diarrhea and despite trackballs predating them by a dozen years, nobody really wants one. Trackpads are used on laptops because they take up less room, but if we're serious about it we still grab a mouse. Windows laptops have had touchscreens almost by default for seven or eight years now and yet touch interfaces remain largely unused. iPhones? iPhones were about the fifth generation tech device; we started with the Newton, then Windows PDAs, then Blackberries, then Windows phones, then the iPhone and the iPhone really took off because you could fuck around with it without pretending you bought it for Excel. It's all just Ubiquitous Computing which has been a buzzword since '88. Technologically? The iPhone was not a revolutionary device. The advantage of the iPhone is that it wasn't a Steve Ballmer piece of shit. More than that, it permanently killed the one thing you really need for productivity: a keyboard. So no, I don't have a hard time comparing a HUD for a fighter with a HUD for "digital work and lifestyle." The fighter ostensibly NEEDS it at any price while the "digital work and lifestyle" crew can be talked into buying it. This is a utility discussion through and through. My argument is "if we needed that we'd have it by now" and your argument is "well we have it now surely we'll find something to do with it." Nah. Doesn't work that way. iPhones and iPads recognize that nobody really needed computers for more than facebook, instagram and youtube so now that's all anybody uses them for. I've got grown women in their '30s on my payroll who are fucking flabbergasted by email because it's just not a part of their lives. Roughly a third of the patients we call at any given time have full mailboxes that can't accept messages because voicemail is simply not a part of their horizon. Our utilization of technology has gone down over the past 20 years while our consumption of technology has gone up; we're doing more with less. Nerd helmets run contrary to this trend. You won't hate Zoom less if it's on your face. Spreadsheets will be no cooler, and if seeing Youtube videos that fill a wall is what you want, you can buy two 85" Sony LCD TVs for less than the Apple thing. For that matter, you can buy a 76" LCD for less than a Meta Quest 2, so most people do.