I like to mention soundcards as a great example of this. For almost 20 years, the sound chip included on motherboards is all most people need. Sure, there's a h

I like to mention soundcards as a great example of this. For almost 20 years, the sound chip included on motherboards is all most people need. Sure, there's a hardcore niche of enthusiasts who want to plug in their keyboards and whatnot, but my motherboard can do 5.1 surround sound at a quality I could not distinguish from perfection, the bottleneck are my speakers. Back in the 80s and early 90s, sound was a huge deal, going from synthetic beeps to full audio playback and you needed to fiddle with a dedicated soundcard to enjoy the latest breakthroughs. Nowadays, hardly anyone bothers because all computers have "good enough" sound out of the box. I find it quite fascinating to think whether something similar might be possible for, say, graphics cards. It seems impossible now, but imagine a monitor at the max resolution your eye can see and real time 3D graphics with enough polygons to never see an edge and all the basic shading/lighting problems solved to Pixar levels... that might be less than 10 years away.