All of the other examples you gave are products constrained by physical reality with a small set of countable use-cases. I don't think computer operating systems are simply mature appliance-like products that have been optimized down their current design. I think there is a lot of potential that hasn't been realized because the very few players in the operating system space have been been hill-climbing towards a local maxima set by path dependence 40 years ago.

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calmbonsai 10 hours ago | parent [-]

To be precise, we're talking about "Desktop Computers" and not the more generic "information appliances".

For example, we're not remotely close to having a standardized "watch form-factor" appliance interface.

Physical reality is always a constraint. In this case, keyboard+display+speaker+mouse+arms-length-proximity+stationary. If you add/remove/alter _any_ of those 6 constraints, then there's plenty of room for innovation, but those constraints _define_ a desktop computer.

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pegasus 8 hours ago | parent [-]

That's just the thing, desktops computers have always been in an important way the antithesis of a specialized appliance, a materialization of Turing's dream of the Universal Machine. It's only in recent years that this universality has come under threat, in the name of safety.

	▲	calmbonsai 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I wouldn't save the driver is "safety". It's happened that a few highly-specialized symbolic manipulation tasks now have enough market value such that they can demand highly specialized UX to optimize task performance. One classic example is the "Bloomberg Box": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal which has been around since the late '80s. You can also see this from the reverse (analog -> digital) in the evolution of hospital patient life-sign monitors and the classic "6 pack" of gauges used in both aviation and automobiles.