1. Prices are down(yes, lower down your guns). I'm not talking about CPUs or GPUs but embedded products. It's absolutely mind blowing that you can get the computational power of a mid-90's computer with the size of a coin for just a few bucks. Same goes for sensors, transceivers, motors and communication modules.
2. 3D printing has come a long way, also dirt cheap and easily accessible to people and is yet another game changer for prototyping. Essentially you can have a functional part in your hands in a day.
3. With works towards lowering carbon footprint(further amplified by inflation), smart devices with low footprint will become more popular-anything which will lower costs. It may sound counter intuitive at first glance but you can imagine how a smart home/office/factory/store/restaurant/anything could be more efficient if power consumption is managed in the most efficient way possible and likely far better than you ever could.
4. Open firmware and hardware is going to be a game changer in another area which seemed completely out of reach just a few years ago - space exploration. Even there, the prices have dropped massively. And there's one more thing when it comes to space exploration: I know that people are really on both extremes when it comes to opinions on Elon Musk but here are my thoughts: ignore what he says and pay attention to what he does. I'm not entirely sure that he's right on electric cars and I suspect that he might not be on the winning side if synthetic fuels become widely available. The one thing which makes me sway towards them are the billions Porsche is pouring into research in that area and credit where it's due: they have been right throughout the entirety of the automotive history.
5. Industrial purposes. Again looking at what Elon Musk is doing - I think he is giving us a glimpse of what Industrial revolution 2.0 might look like. And again something which was further fueled by the pandemic.
The one thing that I see truly missing in the picture is cheap, fast and easy way to make PCB prototypes - that is still an expensive and complicated endeavor. Or at least I am not aware of a cheap and efficient way to do this. I've personally gone as far as trying to figure out a way to use conductive paint for that purpose. With 0 success so far I'm afraid.
I don't think it ever picked up: It was trying to solve a problem which didn't exist at the time. In the mid 2010's when they started popping up, the economy was growing and most of climate change, lowering carbon footprints and all that was seen as "Greta Thunberg's pretentious and delusional world" to working class citizens. And for the most part that still would have been the case if it wasn't for covid and the accompanying inflation. I don't think average Joe has learned a lesson from it or realizing how fragile our economy is. Almost like enforced necessity: "hey my electric bill is 4 times what it used to be" opens a new market. The ecosystem however was(and sadly still is) appalling: You get a hama wifi enabled light bulb, you need to download their app to set it up. You buy a Phillips one a few months later and you need to download yet another app to set it up. Not to mention the absolute hell that are both google home and alexa. Worst of all is that there are no efforts to open source alternatives(home assistant technically relies on either google or amazon). Privacy aside, their interfacing options are equally annoying. I do have a few wifi enabled light bulbs and I turn them on for my dog when I'm not at home through google and it is just as messy as it was on day one.