I'm also wondering about this myself. I also used to check Tom's Hardware, had a subscription to Technology Review and was amazed by almost everything in there.

In fact I had also been working for some time on actually cool tech and was looking forward to go into the office as early as possible and stay late. But as I "progressed" I worked on more and more boring problems and products. The by far most exciting tech is what I use in my free time.

Also it seems that only a small fraction of tech products nowadays are driven by tech geeks.