Alexis Madrigal wants to know what the next wow moment will be:
[W]e mostly do a lot of the things that we used to do years ago — stare at web pages, write documents, upload photos — just at higher resolutions. On the mobile side, we're working with almost the exact same toolset that we had on the 2007 iPhone, i.e. audio inputs, audio outputs, a camera, a GPS, an accelerometer, Bluetooth, and a touchscreen. That's the palette that everyone has been working with — and I hate to say it, but we're at the end of the line. The screen's gotten better, but when's the last time you saw an iPhone app do something that made you go, "Whoa! I didn't know that was possible!?"
Tom at Manifest Destiny fuels the disappointment:
It’s almost as if these endless cresting waves of technical fads are never actually going to carry us beyond the threshold that we perceive but can’t name — that we won’t achieve transcendence through apps, that HTML5 won’t remake human nature, that meaning might be more than one more MacWorld away.
He recently addressed the larger issue:
[T]he most urgent uses for a technology will be addressed first. That’s the beauty of markets. But a consequence is that, during a given technological milieu, engineers will generally find themselves working on tasks that increasingly seem trivial.
The Dish 