CES 2024: Wrap-Up/Best of Show
Apple vs Qualcomm and the Battle for Your Head
By the end of CES 2024 I had put nearly a dozen smart glasses and spatial computing rigs on my face, allowing me to assess the state of smart glasses and spatial computing. Apple nearly coopted CES by announcing Apple Vision Pro availability, but at the show, Qualcomm was driving much of the innovation in XR. Separate report here: CES 2024: All The Things I Put On My Face.
Displays
CES is usually a good place to see innovations in display technology, and this year was significantly more exciting than most.
TVs and Projectors
Samsung kicked things off at First Look with buzzy transparent microLED technology that is not likely to be commercialized. However, its glare-free OLEDs were more accessible and solve a real pain point without requiring a fundamentally new display technology or big price differential.
LG had its own attention-grabbing transparent displays using OLED technology that will be a commercial product later this year, provided that you are the type of person who gives your interior designer a blank check. It was great fun to see LG pull off this magic trick, but this is not a product that anyone actually needs. However, its latest C4, G4, and M4 OLED TVs are now bright enough to use even in environments where there is direct sunlight. Techsponential purchased an LG C2 OLED TV in 2022 for use as a reference monitor; I am hoping to get in LG’s latest for comparison later this year.
TCL leaned heavily on its NFL sponsorship in its press conference; the company has gained market share even during the post-pandemic slump and is using sports marketing to grow its brand. Techsponential is unlikely to get in a review unit of TCL’s most exciting CES 2024 TV announcement, the 115” QM8 miniLED TV, both because they don’t send out review units this large and I still haven’t finished reviewing last year’s 65” QM8. However, I did get a chance to get up close and personal with this massive wall of a TV at CES. If you have the physical space and the ability to get this monstrosity into your home, it’s all kinds of impressive. The brightness, contrast, and HDR will make it hard to justify a projector in many home theaters.
HiSense had its own ginormous miniLED TV at the show, the 110” UX TV. HiSense is claiming some ridiculous stats for this one: 40,000 backlighting zones and an eye-searing 10,000 nits. If that’s accurate, some consumers may actually want to turn the brightness down.
If you do want HDR on an even bigger scale, XGIMI broke out of the portable smart projector market last year with the first Dolby Vision projector, the Horizon Ultra (HomeTheaterView review here). XGIMI used CES to announce its successor, the Horizon Max. The key feature in XGIMI’s marketing is the addition of IMAX Enhanced, but there is essentially no IMAX Enhanced content available, so I would focus instead on the improved hybrid laser engine and the ability to actually mount the projector on the ceiling. Techsponential is looking forward to getting a Horizon Max review unit later this year.
While not a display announcement, Amazon had a big design win for its firetv OS: all future Panasonic TVs will use it, starting with three OLED TVs announced at CES.
Glasses-Free 3D Displays
3DTV is well and truly dead, but glasses-free 3D displays were their own segment at CES. Lenovo had already announced the ThinkVision 27 3D monitor back in September, but showed it off to media at CES. This $3,000 monitor is aimed at 3D design professionals. Samsung aimed its glasses-free 3D monitor concept at gaming at First Look but, Leia had the better application: it attached its eye-tracking 32” 3D monitor to a driving simulator gaming rig. That locks your head into the range where eye-tracking and the 3D effect are perfect, the racing content is already in 3D, and the experience becomes even more natural and immersive. There are also no downsides when using it for 2D because you’ll never use 2D in simulator setup. I didn’t see Looking Glass at CES, but got eyes-on at the MIT XR Hackathon at MIT later in the month instead. Looking Glass’s technology brute forces multi-angle, multi-viewer 3D displays that create enough lenticular slices at wide enough angles (60 degrees off axis) that your eyes are pretty much guaranteed to get stereoscopic images without glasses or eye tracking. Looking Glass has tiny $300 desktop displays for personal holograms or viewing digital models, all the way up to $45,000 60” monitors suitable for corporate and retail displays.
Gaming Monitors
CES saw announcements for extremely fast-refresh rate PC gaming monitors from, well, everyone. My favorite was HP’s OMEN Transcend 31.5” 4K 240Hz QD-OLED flat display. This was not the fastest monitor at the show, nor does it support Dolby Vision. However, it looks gorgeous, has independent switchable USB ports, and can do 140W power delivery. This looks ideal for mixed work and gaming, and I will be asking for a review unit mid-year when it is scheduled to ship.
Low Eyestrain Displays
Finally, TCL improved and expanded the use of its NXTPAPER displays. I have a third-generation NXTPAPER 11 tablet that was launched just months ago in for review, but TCL was willing to risk Osborne-ing itself by showing off even brighter, more colorful fourth-generation versions at CES. These are matte, reflection-free LCDs for much lower eyestrain, and TCL will be using them on tablets and a wider array of smartphones, including models expected to ship in the U.S. and Europe. While some consumers will still prefer a traditional glossy, higher contrast LCD panel, for those who want to reduce eyestrain, NXTPAPER gives TCL a real differentiator beyond just good components at a low price.
Mobile Computing and AI
AI was a buzzword in every CES keynote. In terms of products, AI was mostly just the promise of running Microsoft CoPilot on Windows PCs using Intel’s new Core Ultra processors, the first from Intel to have NPUs. AMD also has new PC processors with NPUs, and Apple and Qualcomm always have, but give Intel marketing credit, every PC OEM at the show dutifully showed off new Intel-powered “AI PCs.” I don't know why you'd want to run stable diffusion on a handheld gaming rig but AMD says you can, and demonstrated just that on an ASUS ROG Ally powered by AMD’s Ryzen Z1.
Meanwhile, behind closed doors Qualcomm’s partners were showing off Snapdragon X Elite designs to distribution partners.
The most exciting Lenovo product was not even at CES – the folding, flexible form factor ThinkPad X1 Fold 16” Gen 1. The much-delayed laptop is now shipping, and a review unit showed up at my house the week after I returned from the show. At CES itself, Lenovo showed off updated ThinkPads, Yoga, IdeaPad, and Legion laptops with the newest Intel and AMD processors. Lenovo was also willing to think outside the box – way outside the box – and built the ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid, which is a true 2-in-1 convertible: the base runs Windows 11 even when the display portion is removed, and the display section (with a separate processor and battery) becomes an independent Android tablet. The redundant processing and battery don’t come cheap ($1999) so buyers will need to truly value the flexibility when it ships in 2Q24.
ASUS launched over 60 products at CES, including updated ROG gaming gear with toned-down design. The ROG 8 gaming smartphone and ROG Zephyrus G14 both still have small LED displays on the rear, but you could reasonably use them in a corporate setting without someone assuming that you just came from a LAN party. The company does still make high-end gaming-only gear, including the ROG Strix with an 18” mini-LED display. I tried on the AirVision M1 display glasses (see CES 2024: All The Things I Put On My Face) but ASUS’ most exciting announcement was the dual-screen ZenBook Duo, which combines some of the best features of folding and dual-screen laptops from Lenovo and HP at a much lower $1499 starting price point.
At an event ahead of CES, HP was showing off updated Spectre x360 laptops with Intel Core Ultra processors running creativity apps that incorporate generative AI. However, it was the monitors (see above), new HyperX gaming accessories, and hybrid work devices that piqued my interest. My favorite was the HP 430 wireless keypad, which provides a Bluetooth numpad that uses mechanical switches, and has five blank buttons with stickers for assignable macros.
Dell approached CES with redesigned XPS and Alienware laptops, all with Intel Core Ultra. Dell leaned even harder on minimalism for its XPS design ID and the new 13”, 14”, and 16” models all have Microsoft’s new dedicated CoPilot button on the keyboard.
The biggest AI buzz was reserved for a startup, Rabbit, that came out of stealth at CES to announce the Rabbit R1. The R1 features whimsical industrial design, perplexing pricing, and an incredibly bold premise: task-based AI that works across different apps in the cloud. Rabbit is smart enough not to try to replace your smartphone (though it does have a 4G-capable MediaTek SoC). The $199 price with no subscription is low enough to make this an impulse buy for tech early adopters – even if it makes it hard to see how Rabbit will ever make a profit on it. I’m eager to get hands-on with a review unit and see if it works.
I covered the early smartphone OS wars, but these days it’s unusual to get hands on with a new mobile OS. At CES I met with Swiss company Apostrophy, where they were showing their privacy-first OS running on Punkt’s MC02 smartphone. While I am usually dismissive of efforts to disrupt the Apple/Google duopoly, there are use cases (ex: government, regulated industries) where a selective approach to Google dependency can make sense. I will be writing more about Apostrophy in the coming months.
While Moore’s Law has enabled rapid improvement in processing power, batteries have not kept pace. At a suite in the Venetian, I met Enovix, which has a battery packaging technology that increases the amount of power in a smartphone battery by 30% with only a slight increase in weight. Enovix is breaking ground on a manufacturing facility in Malaysia, and while it will have nowhere near the capacity to impact the mass market, we should start seeing phones with Enovix batteries in China by the end of the year.
Finally, here’s something I wasn’t expecting to see at CES in 2024: Clicks came out of stealth with a physical keyboard case for the iPhone, which gained considerable buzz both because of its retro novelty, clear positioning (this isn’t being pitched at BlackBerry diehards, but is aimed at freeing up maximum screen space for content creation), and backing by high-profile YouTuber “MrMobile” Michael Fisher.
Sustainability
Companies have been talking about their green efforts for years, but we are now seeing real progress on materials and sourcing, not just packaging and energy offsets. Lenovo, HP, and Dell all showed off laptops made from recycled aluminum, with Dell claiming that the energy used for the recycling process was renewable. Lenovo has expanded where it uses recycled plastic, including 90% Post-Consumer Recycled Content (PCC) plastic in the power adapter casing and 30% PCC plastic in the speaker enclosures for all its new ThinkPads.
The most impressive use of sustainable materials was by Targus, which expanded its EcoSmart line of PC accessories that use 85% recycled plastic in materials your hands actually touch, and Panasonic’s consumer division. Panasonic’s upcoming personal shaver replaces the plastic housing entirely with NAGORI, a sustainable plastic substitute made from sea minerals.
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