John Deere started commercially selling a self-driving tractor this year. That's a pretty big wow. Something straight out of the sci-fi books.
I think it doesn't pop because the internet has been streaming the development of such tech for the last decade or more. It seems incremental because we have had insights into the development process, which is something the masses didn't have access to when Windows 3.1 or the C64 landed.
Gone are the days of decades of behind the scenes R&D suddenly landing in our laps to amaze us. We now watch the R&D unfold in realtime.
But, again, it's boring because we watched the development of those sensors as it was happening. In the past the masses would have been unaware of the development going on. But nowadays we know what's coming and it seems old hat by the time it hits the market.
But that also creates an inherent opportunity for open, 'hackable' versions of the broken, locked down crap. You can see this in much of the embedded ecosystem, where much stuff is unusably locked down simply out of short-term laziness and convenience but many of the most popular products are open.
But there's rarely a 'wow' factor to new tech any more. Everything is incremental improvement and the era of huge leaps forward is well behind us. The step up from a C64 to an Amiga, or a SNES to a Playstation, or an early iPhone from a feature phone, or Win3.1 to Win9x - those were serious upgrades.
But going from a PS5 Pro to PS5, an iPhone 8 to an iPhone 13, 1080p to 4K, an i7 to a 5-generations-newer i7, or a GTX1080 to an RTX3080 - they're nice incremental steps, but not revolutionary leaps forwards.