What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

Sorry, but what is really irritating is the comparison you are making. 1973 component prices are in no way comparable to 1984 component prices, and Xerox's target market and desired margins were completely different from Apple's. If you actually look at the commercial machines that Xerox developed after the Alto prototypes, you find things like the Star, that came out for $16,000 in 1981. Compare that to the Apple Lisa, which came out for $10,000 in 1983. And it is not really a fair comparison, because the Star had much better hardware in every respect. What would be a fair comparison to the Lisa in terms of hardware capabilities would be the 1978 NoteTaker, built with off-the-shelf components for about $15,000 (my estimate: https://oneofus.la/have-emacs-will-hack/2012-01-11-the-perso...). The people at Xerox were perfectly capable of designing and building low-cost computers with third party components. Xerox never entered the low-cost personal computer market. In the early 1980s Xerox sold high-margin workstations to large corporate clients, and in terms of price/performance their offerings were very competitive.

If you want to say that not selling cheap mass-market products has "limited direct impact," that is true, but is also not a very insightful observation.

Not understanding Hypercard was one of Apple's largest mistakes in the world of end-users. It was a real breakthrough in something that end-users could really handle and be usefully programmable by them. Besides not understanding its significance on the Mac, we (old Parc hands) pleaded until we were blue in the face to make HC the basis of a really good web browser (it was a great model of a symmetric author-consumer media tool). Missing the latter was a tragedy.

In the light of the first comment, we could then contemplate an end-user system that combined what was great about Hypercard, Smalltalk, and some other experience from the 80s (e.g. the use-cases from Ashton-Tate "Framework", etc.).

So for the majority of the consumer market, computers just didn't really offer $10,000 of value.

The business market was maybe a little bit different, but still, businesses suffered badly through the early 80s too, and a computer would be an R&D expense moreso than a business expense. It would be a very long time before computers could do things beneficial enough to businesses to justify high upfront costs (plus the costs of finding or training anybody to operate the things). And, computers represented quite a big change in operations, and as anyone that's done any kind of business consulting has learned first-hand, businesses hate that.

With all due respect to the people who are much smarter than I am, the folks that invent and pioneer technology so often view it through a very different lens than the people who would use it, and they really struggle to bring the technology to larger society. Dean Kamen is my favorite example of a brilliant guy creating amazing technology that nobody can afford or find the right use for. Someday somebody else might come along and give the world the same thing but much cheaper and in a different package, and it'll change a lot of lives, and there will as usual be people to say, "But Dean Kamen invented it first and did it better." Well, sure, but nobody knew about it.

Despite the flaws that his detractors are always eager to bring up, that was something I respected about Jobs (and a few other industrialists) -- the combined ability to understand new technology, visualize how it could be brought to a broad market, and then do it successfully.

It's kinda fun to imagine how things might've worked out if Apple had never visited Xerox. Maybe SGI would do it instead and Apple would be that company that made the boxes we all played Oregon Trail on. But, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be using a Xerox OS.

Have we regressed to the point where the simplest statement requires third party ("scientific" references)?

A table offers 100x the functionality of a paper book.

Even just in reading mode, it can carry 1000s of books in it, one can take notes, highlight, search them, remember its position on each, it has its own light (adjustable to match ambient levels or go beyond them), increase the font size (ever though about those with no perfect eyesight? Sucks to be them with paper books huh?), even spoken to the reader through TTS.

Not to mention that the price of ebooks is much cheaper than paper books to boot (and that one can even pirate the latter, if they are so inclined). Or that there are also 100,000s of FREE ebooks (classics, and such) but seldom (if ever, except for charity or so) free paper books.