Everywhere you turned over the last few years, someone was promising The Next Big Thing After Smartphones. Yes, they’d say, the iPhone is the most ubiquitous product in the history of consumer electronics and the smartphone reprogrammed the world in utterly unparalleled ways. But have you seen this voice assistant that makes Morgan Freeman give you driving directions, or these humongous goggles that let you play ping-pong with someone across the globe? This is the future.

We’re in a moment of retrenchment in the tech industry, as companies of all types grapple with a tough economy and the fact that the pandemic wasn’t so much an accelerant of future trends as it was, well, a global pandemic that forced everyone to change their lives...

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