What was the last truly innovative thing you witnessed?

If you remember navigating with a compass and map, GPS is goddamned magical.

When phones got developed so much, you can virtually do half of the things on them as you would a laptop.
It sounded like you didn't see what the point things were when they arrived around your time. But I can tell you, the passing 90s and 2000s just straight shot technology faster than we can comprehend.

Every so often I hold a microsd card and I think about how much storage is on that pinky-nailed sized $20 device. Compared to ancient hard drives it is one of the few things that makes me remember "oh shit I live in the future".
- Couldn't agree more. I put a 128GB card into my action camera last night, then remembered that my first computer had a 170MB hard drive. That's close to a thousand times more storage, and according to t'internet, it's physically more than two thousand times smaller :o
  
  The first hard drive I used was a whooping 5megs and the CP/M machine couldn't handle it so it was partitioned as a million floppies.
  
  I have a 512GB card in my steam deck, seen listings for them upwards of 2 TB, reliability scares me a bit with that much data but still, it's impressive how far flash memory has come. I remember being excited about a 64MB thumbdrive and buying my first 1GB one.

mRNA vaccines do it for me at the moment.
https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Understanding-COVID-19-mRNA-Vaccines
- All the more reason to despise RFKjr.
- Montana is banning those. Expect a nationwide ban to come soon.
- I recall having vaccines in the 80s, probably what saved me from polio
  
  The commenter said mRNA vaccines.

The internet has totally changed how humanity works, learns, socialises, and plays. I cannot think of a more dramatic social upheaval, aside from possibly the industrial revolution, or the taming of the horse.
- The first information revolution, is somewhat equivalent. With the invention of the printing press, distribution of information became an order of magnitude cheaper.
  Literal months of work to produce a single copy, became a few hours to setup the movable type, then produce as many copies as you want.
  Daily gazettes became a thing that was possible to do.
- I agree. I suspect the internet will retrospectively eventually even be looked at as an "information revolution" on par with the industrial one. I know that sounds like an enormous claim but there is a long road yet, so I don't think it will turn out to sound so crazy. Each revolution (and its increase in power) comes along with responsibilities and potential dark sides, though. I think similarly to how the industrial revolution opened the door to industrial war, we are already seeing the pain brought by various (distributed, automated) information war techniques. I love how we live in an age now where a person with internet access and enough tenacity can eventually learn almost anything, and contribute back, but at the same time I worry deeply about the rolling waves of belligerence, disinformation & selective amnesia coercion, gatekeeping, and fraud that have come with it. I hope humanity can get those under some degree of control soon.
- that was eventually for the worse though, because of the megacorps who control it now.

Honestly if you're not putting the internet and the general proliferation of personal computers and then smartphones in the "truly innovative" category, then I'm not sure anything will make the cut—I'd make the argument that both are more innovative than flight which is something we can observe in nature.
- I don't see very many humans naturally flapping their arms flying around very often
  There was that one guy, but I'd say it was more falling with style than flying
  ... and he didn't stick the landing

I'm a software guy, so I'm gonna go with 'free compilers.' Back when every company was keeping their secret sauce close to their chest, RMS turned around and released gcc for free. That was... new, to say the least. It paved the way for much of the software you see eating the world today.

After reading the comments here, I see the problem: You judge past things by what they have become, and new things by what they are. Nothing will ever be "truly innovative" by those standards.
The automobile was for a long time just a more expensive carriage. The airplane was a pass time for the ultra rich, while anyone else got by with hot air balloons if they wanted to fly. The soviets got to space first by pointing a ballistic missile upwards.
We have CRISPR and can alter the Genes of any living organism to match our needs, but oh well, it's only used by labs right now and anyone else got by perfectly fine by selective breeding, can't call that innovative, can we?
- ... The automobile was for a long time just a more expensive carriage...
  100%. To add:
  Automobile was actually slower than the horse for good many decades.
  
  A good horse is like 3 horsepower at least :)

The Internet has changed almost every aspect of daily life, I don't see why you don't think it is as innovative as the invention of the car.
- The internet had niche use for enthusiast nerds. An internet connected handheld device was the game changer.
  
  I think that is downplaying it, while mobile devices caused the major boom in access, the Internet was already prolific before
  
  The internet was well established before the mobile web really took off. It looked different (most of us would say better), but it was already a mature part of everyday life. The dot-com “bubble” around Y2K predates the iPhone by years.

If you think that the internet is not revolutionary, what right do you have to claim that automobile ever was?

Well, I disagree with the premise.
But perhaps one of the more obvious physical examples are Blue and White LEDs (1992). Small gadgets used to always have red LEDs, maybe green ones, or an unlit 7 segment display, everything else was too expensive or too energy consuming for battery powered devices. And not only that, RGB Diodes also saw the end of pretty much all cathode-ray tubes.
You see kids, back in the olden days before white LEDs, the only way to get blue light was to throw high energy electron ray on a phosphor coating. So anything blue or white before the 90s was made with that technology, from car radios to TV screens.
I'd personally also keep an eye out what the cheap electric motor will do next. From "hoverboards", civilian drones, e-scooters and the modern e-bike, it's only a matter of time before the new use case will emerge.

Gene Editting with CRISPR and other techniques. Eventually this will be truly personalized medicine at an affordable fee.
Fusion with more power output than input will become a game changer. Currently we have done fusion but the energy to do the demonstration was in total more than the output

Accurate and repeatable motion systems.
Born too late to say that semiconductors are the thing for me, but the use has made closed loop control systems viable. Along with stepper, servo, and now new to me piezoelectric motors and linear stages.

I’d say the iPhone. A truly innovative, smart phone. When it first came out, I mean.

3d printer

I'm a mechanical eng turned software, computing and the like are super visible but there's been a huge amount of advancement in physical things in our lifetime, Steel in particular. By no means an expert, some of this I've been out of the industry for a while so just operating on memory, totally welcome any corrections!
I'm not a metallurgist, but worked with them, there's lots of grades out there but some of the stuff being used in automotive is seriously interesting (I think they're boron grades but I can't recall), needs specific treatment like hot stamping but they can easily hit into the 1-2 GPa range for yield strength once it's processed. It's allowed material to be rolled thinner for the same part strength so you end up with lighter vehicles.
Coatings too have changed a lot, non-chromium passivation is a thing, galvanised materials are no longer just zinc + a bit of aluminum, there's aluminum + silicon coatings that are supposed to offer decent corrosion resistance at high temperatures, those fancy automotive steels get coated in it for things like mufflers. Construction there were zinc+magnesium coatings starting to show up, supposed to be resistant to coating damage.
Processing has changed a lot in a century too, steel is substantially metallurgically cleaner these days, probably actually cleaner too with more electric arc furnaces and hydrogen direct reduced iron.
It's oldish these days but pipeline inspection was increasingly using Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducer (EMAT) tools when I worked in that field. It let you do ultrasound inspection of steel pipes without needing a liquid medium, so things like cracks and material defects that are hard (or nearly impossible) to find using Magnetic Flux Leakage tools are a lot more accessible to gas pipeline operators as they don't need to do things like plan around liquid batching.

dick sucking robot

Katamari Damacy
- Naaa.
  Na na na na na na na, na naa naa na na na

Medicines and medical care have improved significantly
- Same could be said about everything we have though couldn't it?
  Cars, aircraft, boats... All improved significantly...
  But is any of it truly innovative?
  
  If my son was born when I was born, he wouldn't be alive and my wife may not have survived the birth. If he was born 5-10 years ago, he'd have brain damage. Today, because we know what to look for and how to treat and prevent many pregnancy problems and early childhood problems he's alive, healthy and thriving. There are a million innovations that are super niche, so we don't know about them.
  
  Yes. Taking an existing thing and improving upon it is the literal definition of innovation.

Life is vastly different than in the 80s. You can literally know anything you want right now, simply by asking an artificially intelligent handheld computer that has access to every discovery known to man. We're on the cusp of being able to cure almost any disease and live forever. We can blow the planet up 10x over and still have ammo left. Scientists can see so far away that they can almost see the beginning of time. Nothing your great grandfather saw in his life will compare to what you will see in yours, have already seen.
- "Um, yeah, but we could have already known everything thousands of years ago if we had just made any effort. AI is just a worse version of what evolution already made between my ears. We could have already blown the planet up 70 years ago. The beginning of time is sooooo 13.8 billion years ago, YAWN!" - OP probably
  
  Just not paying attention. We advancing too quickly imo. Not mature enough as a species to control this kinda stuff

As unpopular as this may be, LLMs (aka. "AI" like ChatGPT).
I don't think we've seen something that'll change the world as much as I think it will since the Internet was introduced. It will change the way we interact with computers. For a lot of people, it already has.
- Don't use them tꝏ often , specially not enough to know how gꝏd they truly are . But if want basic info about some thing , don't like sifting thru pages and pages of search engine garbage . LLMs I used automate that process and consolidate the info into something fairly easy to understand
  Peops hate LLMs bcus they supposedly "turn peops brain to mush" , but … what if my brain's ALREADY mush ? Think this's one instance LLMs might help more than hinder , so shouldn't be discarded entirely

The first time I tried steering-assist on a car felt like a significant transition.
Even though it was a simple "stay in lane"feature, feeling the car moving the wheel took a bit of getting used to.
I know that there are lots of other replies about the Internet and phones, but I've always liked maps so as a specific example that's an area that has transformed astoundingly. I have a map in my pocket that can show me anywhere in the world, give me directions, monitor traffic levels, show aerial photographs and street-level photographs of many areas of the world. I can fly around a 3D view of a city's buildings, and even see where my family members are.
Oh, and you can buy vacuum cleaners that don't need bags, now.

Bone conducting headphones
Peltier personal AC neck coolers. (eg Coolify2)

I was pretty impressed with the Samsung Gear VR (and Google Cardboard before it) when it was first released back in 2015. Instead of having to spend a lot on a fancy computer system and headset to experience VR, you could just stick your phone close to your eyes. Of course, it wasn't as good as an actual VR headset, but it was the first VR experience that was easily approachable for 'regular' people, and was a lot better than I thought it'd be.