Arguably form factor, i.e. smartphones and tablets. Whether you think that's incremental or not is subjective, I guess.
I would say incremental, but it does solve a different set of problems (connectedness, mobility) than the PC.
I would say incremental, but it does solve a different set of problems (connectedness, mobility) than the PC.
It remains to be seen where LLMs and this crop of ML tech can go in the garden of forking paths, and whether they can reach truly interesting places.
Sure, they also do other tasks we were already doing in 1995: mobile telephony, mobile TV watching (we had portable handheld TVs back then--they were awful but they worked), mobile music listening (Sony Walkman), easy-to-use photography, but there's some things that we couldn't do at all before this technology became mainstream, like mobile banking.
Still though, GPS navigation was definitely a common thing pre-iPhone. I remember being gifted a cheap one a few years before the iPhone came out. We didn't need smartphones to do GPS navigation. TomTom came out in 2004, three years before the iPhone launched and four years before Android had Google Maps with Turn by Turn navigation.
In the early days of GPS, you needed an actual address to navigate to. That's not very useful if you don't know where you want to go in the first place. Smartphones changed all that: now you don't need to know a specific place you want to go, you just need to know what you want to do generally, and the nav app will help you find where exactly you want to go and take you there. That's impossible without either an internet connection or a very large local database (that's out of date).
And the Magellan GPS I had pre-iPhone had quite a POI database as well. I think it had monthly updates available online. I could search "Blockbuster" or "gas station" or "public parking" or "hotel" and it would know locations. Obviously it wasn't making dinner recommendations but it did have a lot of restaurants in it.
Also you specifically called out turn by turn. Knowing the one off holiday hours of a hole in the wall restaurant isn't necessary for turn by turn GPS.
Smartphones did bring something huge to the table, and exploded accordingly. But here we are, less than 2 decades from their introduction and... the pace of improvement has gone back to being incremental at best.