At the world's biggest gadget show, everything is always amazing. Every year, more than a hundred thousand CES[1] attendees pour into Las Vegas to convince each other and the world that everything before was crap and everything to come will change that. They go to see the biggest and thinnest new TVs, the fastest and lightest new laptops, the headphones and the phone cases and the drones and the refrigerators. All of it more powerful than last year's model, more connected, more deeply integrated into your everyday life.
CES 2018, which kicks off with a day of press conferences on Monday, January 8, followed by three days of presentations, demos, and booth tours inside the continent-sized Las Vegas Convention Center, will be filled with new products the likes of which we've never seen. The tech industry sits at the beginning of so many fundamentally new things, from augmented and virtual reality to self-driving cars[2] to the smart home[3] to all things artificial intelligence[4]. Each of these will re-shape our lives in ways we don't yet understand. Neither do the tech companies. And so CES will be a testing ground for lots of products and ideas, most surely ridiculous and a few possibly game-changing.
Brave New World
In many ways, actually, you could argue that CES is more relevant than it's ever been. Everything's a gadget now! A smart washing machine doesn't seem so ridiculous anymore, now that you can control it with your voice and it can automatically help save you money. 4K is finally tipping from high-end nicety to standard fare. Everyone needs new headphones, now that the jack on their phone is gone. And the next version of every appliance...