VR is a solution in search of a problem. That being said... when I worked at Linden, we did all our company meetings in-world. It did work reasonably well to bring geographically diverse participants "together". And to this day, I LOVE that in Second Life you can pretty much always see who's talking (as opposed to every conference call thing I've seen where you can't tell who's who.)

The "problem" with VR isn't so much that it's VR as much as it's less like hardware and more like a social media website. You can buy a PC and not keep it hooked up to the network very often and it's still kinda useful. In fact, I often disconnect from the net to do coding tasks without distraction. Not so for a VR headset; it's a peripheral for hooking you up to a very active network connection. You could have a local VR environment, but it's most likely a game.

And the whole thing about media sites is they value ownership of your identity over functionality. During the final days of the "classic Linden" era, we were working on an Open Metaverse where we would provide services to other metaverse operators, but no one wanted to share ID info.

But to answer your question... what's next in terms of hardware? Think of the modern era, but easier to manufacture. What you may not remember about your dad's laptop is it had a real keyboard. Now we have crap chicklet keypads on everything. Want a laptop with a real keyboard? Tough Rockos, chump.

I worked with Jeff Hawkins when I was a Tandy contractor and later at Handspring. He made an observation that may be obvious to the product manager types, but blew my little engineering mind away: "People don't buy platforms, they buy products." To me that means it's really hard to sell an IoT Gateway into someone's home. (Not impossible, just really, really hard.) The closest thing to a platform you can sell to a home user is a wi-fi/router combo. And even then they're probably renting it from their provider. (That's a long paragraph to say IoT gateway devices aren't the next PC.) Or maybe streaming boxes. But again, people aren't buying those to be part of a hardware ecosystem (as much as Apple wishes you would.) They're buying those so they can get content from a streaming provider they already have an account with.

Wrapping this all up... Everything is connected these days (or at least potentially connected.) I had to be careful to not accidentally buy a coffee maker that didn't phone home to post my coffee drinking habits to someone's social media platform. I think "the PC" is pretty close to it's terminal form. As a device that stays in one place and lets you run a browser and maybe excel on a reasonably sized screen. Laptops are similar, but they have crap keyboards and smaller screens and the TSA agent at your local airport won't bat an eye when you bring them on a plane. A VR headset would be a different kind of device for a different purpose. It's like comparing mobile phones to automated sprinkler controllers. They're used for radically different things and it would be an uphill climb to convince people to use a mobile browser on the sprinkler or permanently attach their mobile phone to a relay/valve control system.

What comes next to replace the modern PC? Slightly smaller, slightly faster, but crappier (more difficult to use) PCs.