The iphone had marketing and inserted itself as a piece of conspicuous consumption, a showy status item. The first iphone was a piece of shit.

The entire first few generations of smart phones were terrible, slow, awful products across the board. The overwhelming usefulness of smartphones are what kept people using them, and pushed the whole industry forward to the point they got good.

VR doesn't have obvious, overwhelming usefulness for the average person, and you generally can't go to Starbucks and loudly show off your new VR headset, or casually take it out of your pocket/bag and be like "Oh, this? Yeah I got the newest consumerist item, it's sooo good, no big deal (they think I'm cool now right?)."