I'm extremely bullish on AR/VR, neurotech, and smart wearables over the next decade or two, but this article seems oddly focused on AR glasses replacing phones.

I'm extremely bullish on AR/VR, neurotech, and smart wearables over the next decade or two, but this article seems oddly focused on AR glasses replacing phones. We're definitely seeing the phone separate into pieces closer to the body (wireless earbuds and watches), with the phone serving as a hub. The Apple Watch is almost where the original iPhone was in terms of technical capability (and has already passed some of the iPods, minus a headphone jack), but it lacks the large screen, large battery, and large compute power of modern phones. This should sound familiar: this was the main difference between the iphone and laptops at the time. Compute power and battery sizes can maybe reach good enough levels to replace the phone's role as a hub for most people within the next decade, but it's not clear anything can be done about the screen without expanding along or beyond the wrist. This, to me, is the value proposition of an AR HUD (which, maybe, absorbs or emerges from the growing smart earbud/headphone category). When looking at it as a compute element, I don't know if putting the brains on one's head (ironically) will be compelling vs the flexibility of storing it in a pocket or purse or strapped to some other body part with better ability to bear the extra load. I doubt AR glasses will gain brains fast enough to displace phones before something else takes its place. Strictly viewed as a device for viewing/hearing things controlled by some other device the user owns, the biggest challenge for glasses replacing the phone screen will be competition from all the other displays we're putting everywhere we look (living rooms, cars, pockets, etc...) It's possible AR wins by some benefit of economics (fewer screens!), but it's also possible that it loses because of inertia. I have a lot more to say on this, but half a century from now, I think we'll certainly look back at the phone as a weird transitional device with a lot of odd UX compromises, but as it was (and still is) for laptops, desktops, and mainframes before them, the phone will probably not go away in some niches for decades (if ever). It's still a huge question to me whether over-eye AR will be the leading form factor that replaces them, and I'm unconvinced that the mass market future is AR glasses alone.