One day reading the latest computer magazines was Steve Jobs talking about a computer so easy to use a 2 year old could use it. I could not begin to comprehend what he was talking about. He was talking about the Lisa. I don't know how long it took me to find out what in the world was going on.
It maybe like 2 mouses in that it has eye tracking and hand tracking. Which might make 2x as good as a mouse.
I'm not saying the iPhone was obvious. I'm saying it wasn't coming after years of failure in the product space. They did a good job and leaped very quickly to a good solution. Absent Apple, the rest of the market would have gotten there, though. They weren't swimming upstream, they just got where the stream was going faster than anyone else by quite a lot.
iPad was swimming upstream. So is a VR headset.
The iPad is the more interesting one to me because tablets had been a Next Big Thing for a long time, to the point that the common wisdom was that they weren't going to happen. Phones become slabs-of-glass because of the constraint of fitting into a pocket. Tablets couldn't compete with laptops in the absence of that constraint. The iPhone was the birth of a new industray; the iPad breathed life into an already dead industry.
This seems a much closer comparison to VR. Even before the current push represented by the Oculus and similar gen products, VR headsets had been a Next Big Thing for decades now. I'd still characterize the field as basically dead, at least at an Apple scale. If it hasn't outright plateaued, its first derivative is certainly only marginally positive. If the Apple Vision product succeeds it'll be another breathing life into a dead industry play.