Is CES a Good Show for Gadgets Any More?

It’s been a busy week at CES, the tech show with a sprawling presence along the length of the Las Vegas strip. For many attendees (myself included), there’s an element of pride in the step count achieved each day, as we traverse the hotels, ballrooms and convention centre in search of exciting new breakthroughs in tech.

However, “search” really is the operative word here. Anyone following the CES news flow may well have been disappointed by the lack of breakthrough gadgets being unearthed. Throughout the week I’ve been asked what the most exciting thing I’ve seen at the show is — and there’s just not an immediate answer that springs to mind.

I should caveat this by saying that there’s obviously plenty going on across the show. The most obvious “moment” of CES this year was the keynote presentation by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Monday. I stood in line for well over an hour and only just managed to find a seat in the 12,000-seater arena, which should give a good sense of the excitement this event generated.

I’d predicted (albeit not all that boldly) before the show that AI would be a hot topic and that Nvidia’s keynote would play into this, but the fervour here was even greater than I’d expected, more akin to a rock concert than a tech event.

Mr Huang’s keynote address to a packed arena contained significant announcements, including a wave of RTX 50-series GPUs aimed mostly at gamers and a new miniature AI supercomputer called Project Digits, which is similar in size to a Mac mini and is designed to run sophisticated AI models on a user’s desk. More broadly, the promise of a new era of “physical AI” dedicated to more effectively helping robots to navigate the real world will keep plenty of people interested.

However, on the topic of AI I’d hoped to hear more persuasive narratives about improving areas like the smart home and home entertainment, but I’ve been left underwhelmed. The day-one keynote presentations from Samsung and LG didn’t inspire much excitement about real progress in this segment, and although there have been pieces of promising news in connectivity thanks to the Matter standard, the vision of a truly intelligent smart home still feels years away. This is one area where the repetition of trends from one year to the next feels particularly gruelling.

In contrast to this, it was genuinely exciting to hear that a CES concept product of years gone by will actually see the light of day. Samsung confirmed that it plans to officially launch Ballie, the cute ball-shaped robot debuted at CES 2020 (as we covered here). No official details — crucially, price and timing —have been revealed yet but the firm’s intent to bring Ballie to market could signal the early innings of home robots as a legitimate category, which has been many years in the making, and a subject that we’ve featured in our predictions for the future of technology plenty of times.

Another area with more solid progress was the PC category, which always tends to do well at CES. We’ve seen some notable updates this week, especially with new chips from AMD, Intel and Qualcomm, which all promise continued improvements in performance across relative price tiers. Lenovo also grabbed headlines with its rollable laptop offering, which is slated for launch later in 2025 after it first made an appearance at last year’s show.

Hand-held gaming enjoyed a few moments in the headlines, with devices like the Acer Nitro Blaze, the Lenovo Legion Go S and the MSI Claw 8+ all garnering some limelight. That said, the thunder for this category was stolen by the continued leaks swirling around Nintendo’s rumoured Switch 2 console. A full 3D-printed model was brought to CES by an accessory designer, and speculation about when Nintendo will unveil its new console is a hot topic at the show, even though the Japanese game-maker isn’t attending.

One final area that’s seen lots of activity at CES is smart glasses. I’ve tried out myriad designs throughout the week, ranging from camera- and microphone-powered devices like the Ray-Ban Meta glasses to devices with built-in augmented reality displays.

In particular, there’s been a wave of lightweight glasses using modest, single-colour displays to offer a simple interface for limited heads-up information such as real-time translation and subtitling. However, I’m sceptical about the prospects of these products. Augmented reality glasses have had many false dawns, and I struggle to see why these current offerings would change that dynamic. As I said before, it feels like 2025 could be a tough year for this category as it seeks to prove itself once again.

All in all, CES 2025 is a tough week to try and summarize. Clearly, given the number of announcements I’ve highlighted, there’s been plenty going on, with thousands of announcements and updates from across the industry — we’ll be publishing a full report with analysis on this for clients in the coming week. I haven’t even touched on categories like automotive, which are a huge part of the show. But my main bugbear is that it feels as though CES 2025 has pressed repeat on the topics of previous years, recycling plenty of ideas and concepts that we’ve seen before.

Part of that is just the reality of modern-day trade shows. They’re a valuable chance for people throughout the industry to meet and share ideas with a global audience, and that certainly hasn’t gone away. Yet CES used to have a reputation as the home of the weird, wonderful and wacky, and a chance to glimpse the future of technology. This year, I’m not sure it fulfilled that promise.