It’s the laws of physics. Dennard scaling is dead, unless someone discovers new, even smaller atoms and a way of disabling quantum tunnelling.
It’s also the fact that faster speeds are unnecessary and nobody wants to pay more for them, so electronics companies have focused on efficiency/reducing power draw instead (which, incidentally, let’s you run your computer faster anyway).
Not anymore!
It was the Russian standard rifle (that fires AK47 bullets) when their standard SMG was the AK47, right before they realized that the AK47 works just as well as a rifle and just made the AK47 their standard rifle. That didn’t stop Stalin from stockpiling enough of em for WW3 tho.
So, when the USSR collapsed, they dumped approximately seven hundred trillion SKSes onto the market and they were selling for less than $100 each. Which made them cheap until Americans realized they were both cheaper and better than a hipoint.
And Linux used to not have a GUI. Are you going to complain that Linux is too difficult to use because it used to be command-line based? What even is this point?
When do you think Linux didn’t have a GUI? CDE was released in 1993, and let’s be honest: nobody used Linux before 1993.
And the difference between polytheistic religions and Christianity is that instead of having a god of archery and a god of prostitutes, Christianity has a patron saint of archery and a patron saint of prostitutes. Totally different!
There’s always something to innovate, you just get diminishing returns. The problem is that sooner or later, the returns diminish below the profit rate of banditry and rent-seeking.
Also, there’s plenty of wildly profitable innovation, but so much of it isn’t politically feasible because it will hurt the profits of existing rich people whose permission you need to upend the status quo. Usually this isn’t a conspiracy so much as the alternative being so completely incomprehensible in the current paradigm that it’s just written off as crazy and a terrible idea.