1. things which would clearly be useful, but couldn't be made yet or which cost too much to be practical. Example: flying cars, tablet computers.
2. things that could be done easily with current technology but hadn't been tried yet. Examples: Uber, Twitter.
A useful subclass of #2 is things which are known to be useful and have just become or are just about to become makeable. A good example is the Motorola Star-Tac, the first flip phone. It's a Star Trek communicator, made real.
Apple is good in that space. The Macintosh was of that type. Good UNIX workstations already existed, as did the Alto and Dorado, they just cost too much. The original 1984 Mac was a severely cost-reduced workstation - tiny screen, no hard drive, floppy disk storage only. It took a few more years to get a hard drive into the product, at which point it became useful.
The iPod was also in that space. It wasn't the first MP3 player. The iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, although it was the first to get rid of the keyboard.
So that's where Apple innovates - at the leading edge of what's commercially possible. They don't do long-term efforts to make a technology work, as RCA did with color TV and IBM did with computers.
They have voice control tech, they have end devices in all important form factors (TV, tablets, phones, watch), they have customers that like everything being tied together.
Only issue is that I'm not sure if they could do it with external partners making most of the devices (how do you guarantee quality to people? Premium home IoT is scarce for now), and making everything themselves would be a lot of different pieces to make.
Contrary to popular opinion, IoT is a dead end. The future isn't a million devices scattered around your home, but one capable robot that can be your servant and do everything for you.
Just grabbing something from the fridge and putting it on a plate is a massive task for robotics.
I do think it'll be more like 50 years to get self-driving cars being sold to the general public that can drive autonomously anywhere though.
HTC Vive sold 15,000 in ten minutes, and 100,000 in three months: http://www.roadtovr.com/htc-vive-sales-figures-data-100000-s...
"Digi-Capital cut its rather optimistic forecast for spending on virtual and augmented reality in 2020 to $120 billion, down from an earlier forecast of $150 billion." - http://fortune.com/2016/07/05/virtual-reality-htc-sales/
People in the 1890s and 1690s and so on probably thought they were plateaued on things too. What are the odds that we're the real plateau? It might not be in consumer tech, but it's out there, waiting for the right person to discover it.
Putting privacy concerns aside, imagine having contact lenses + voice and/or gesture control augmenting your life. Combine that with real-time health monitoring, all powered by your blood glucose.
That's hinging on still quite a lot of big technologies delivering and becoming mass-consumerable, but that is one way in which I can see technology and connectivity being taken to the next level in a similar sense that smartphones did.
Note: I am not particularly pro IoT nor wearables, but can see this becoming a thing in the future.
The one area where people's opinions did get the NBT right was probably in 2013, where the NBT was predicted to be enterprise.
