Actually I think the guys who predicted that iPhone will flop are the same guys who think VR is world-changing. The common theme is misunderstanding of the potential users and the problems the product solves.
VR solves zero problems for me.
This might well be right. VR proponents like to present people who disagree with them as conservatives, but is it not in fact the case that the VR proponents are the real conservatives?
That is, the ubiquity of computing devices that you get with smartphones, which the iPhone kicked off, is something genuinely fairly new, which not a lot of people had previously imagined. VR, on the other hand, is something people have been imagining for decades, producing compelling fictional versions; but every attempt to implement it suggests that it's not actually a very good idea. VR proponents are stuck with a nostalgic vision of the future, rather than trying to imagine something genuinely novel.
(On the other hand, people were imagining video phones as the next big thing for years, and they seemed to never take off, until they did; Skype hasn't replaced non-video phones, but it is ubiquitous.)
