Because it's sad as hell, and I just realized I'm strengthening your argument instead of countering it. It probably will go in that direction.
Yeah yeah - 'if I asked people what they wanted, they'd have said faster horses', but if they knew what cars were that quote wouldn't exist. Everybody knows what AR is, a sizable chunk of people have tried it, and nobody seems to want it. If there were some ultra high end AR goggles for $10, I still wouldn't buy them (sans obvious angle shoots like reselling/repurposing the hardware or just pack-ratting it away in a closet).
The reason I mention this is because of this paradox where everybody assumes its success, but nobody has any interest themselves in using it. I think this is because AR is just about literally always a part of sci-fi and so we kind of assume well it must be what the future holds. But it seems like one of those many ideas that sounds way better than it actually turns out to be in real life.
Otherwise... Eh. I don't care enough. Yet.
I'm also bad at learning & remembering a lot of people's names at once in social settings, so I'd like a discrete pair of AR glasses that used a local model to add virtual nametags to people in certain situations. (Assuming I controlled the data - I wouldn't like it if this meant data about my acquaintances would be sold behind my back).
So there's at least two potential AR applications I'd be interested in, assuming they could be made to work in a trustworthy & reliable manner for under $1k.
There are probably uses for AR today that are legitimately useful. I've never used them but I hear good things about the uses in factory floors and classes with technical machinery. But the expectation is always that that the glasses with a ridiculous battery pack (the room sized computer) will become something of a size where every single person will want to have it on them at all times.
Living memory of people alive right now are the room size computers becoming dirt cheap ESP32s.
On top of that I have little interest in discussions in real life turning into internet discussions where it's two people searching "proof my view is right [and his is wrong]" and then repeating arguments they oft have little to no understanding of. And there are also practical issues - girls would probably not enjoy the fact that there'd 100% be insta-strip apps. And then there's the dystopia of surveillance and all that stuff. Nah, not gonna happen.
More generally I think smartphones changed the world hard in one direction but, at scale, are starting to change it back in the opposite direction. They enabled great convenience, but it turns out that the nature of 24/7 tech connectivity are also quite unpleasant in many ways. And speaking of things being banned it's already quite obvious that many apps today are already working, intentionally, to function as digital drugs that will, almost certainly, also end up being treated as such in the future.
I think the one and only reason that we're stalling control of these 'digital substances' is because intelligence agencies have tremendous back-door influence and we've created a sort of global honey pot. There's probably still some fantasies of pre-crime and the nonsense belief that if you just control the message you can make people believe whatever you want (really worked well for the USSR, North Korea, and everywhere else that's tried such...). Once we get over the myopia, these things are on their way out.
that's basically just make-up, as the GP said
You don't put makeup on other people without first asking and receiving permission.
If you don't see this, I don't know what else to say