CES 2023 — More Business, Less Spectacle
I walked 65,000 steps and looked at every booth, so you don’t have to.
CES 2023 (or #CES2023 as they say) was my return to the live show after a two-year hiatus for me. I believe this was my 30th CES in Vegas. It is funny to think back to attending when the badges were imprinted like credit cards and were manually scanned at booths in exchange for brochures. We didn’t have cell phones so the success rate for meetings was about 10%. The convention center hardly had any place for snacks, so dehydration and hunger ruled the day. And back then the convention center was pretty far from the hotels and there were never enough cabs. The show probably peaked at almost 200,000 attendees and 4,500 booths. CES2023 looks to be something around 100,000 attendees and they say about 2,500 booths. The show got smaller, but I think it got better. It certainly became easier to attend and to learn.
CES is so big that any generalizations are likely to have exceptions, but I want to generalize to offer a sense of what it was like. The show was much more spread out. In part this was the tail of the pandemic (though Las Vegas has almost no indications of a pandemic at all). The booths were generally smaller. The programming of the booths was much less spectacle and much more focused on connecting to partners, ecosystems, or generally b2b. In fact, that is what the show is supposed to be about — distributors, retailers, products, components all finding their next connections. The fact that for the past 20 years or so resulted in a show that was covered wall-to-wall in international news for broad consumption tended to distort the purpose of the show. The drive for mass-market consumption of the show itself drove mega-booths, tour groups going through the show, and a level of showmanship [sic] that was at the very least bombastic and at its worst tacky and offensive. It was only back then that the show was broadly opened up to attendees who were not affiliated with the industry. Prior to that, it was not uncommon to tip the cab driver dropping you off at the airport with your badge so they could hop in and have a look — and to understand these weird electronics people that come to Vegas but don’t gamble or go to shows.
The audience for the show seemed to me to go back to focusing on others in the industry. Companies that wanted to have a presence at the show but strictly focus on doing “business” (meaning signing deals up/down the supply chain) passed on having public booths and instead had “hospitality suites” which were private rooms off the show floor, often set up with displays and signage but not open without an appointment for work. While the action was always in these private areas, this year seemed much more so. That’s what it used to be like.
The extra space afforded the show made it much easier to walk the whole show and not need to constantly battle the crowds. The reduced spectacle meant that with few exceptions you could pace yourself, study the exhibitions, and not be overwhelmed by amplified skits or flying swag. In fact, there were even fewer “stages” occupying the booths on the floor, and most booths were much more museum exhibit-like with a walk-through flow that seemed to work. If there were staged or scripted shows these were not nearly the focal point or square footage. All of these are much more like the 1990s. If you’ve seen Halt and Catch Fire then this is much more how the show felt (that was COMDEX, not CES) though almost no one was wearing a three-piece suit.
A subtle point is that many companies in the intervening two years have moved their booths — premium locations cost more money as does square footage. You always look for what companies have the northern most edge of the central hall. Sony, LG, Samsung were there though smaller. Microsoft, Intel, and others have moved to hospitality suites. Previously giant booths like Panasonic, Nikon, Canon, were smaller though closer to the central hall. With the ever-increasing focus on automotive and transport (and batteries) most of these exhibits moved to the newly opened West Hall which is absolutely amazingly nice.
Taken together, these changes all made it much easier to see the focus and to get a sense that there is a Cambrian explosion in “gadgets” that build on the connected-mobile-cloud world infrastructure that is now mature, assumed in all markets, and open for innovation. No longer does it take a physical gadget to make devices work together nor does it require every device have a screen, storage, and network cable. As a result, gadgets now are much more understandable, and it is much easier to see if it solves a problem or appears (to me) to solve a problem. A way to think about this is that if you have an idea for a healthcare device or for a security “sensor” then you can focus on building that and simply use a phone OS, AWS, and wireless protocols to connect across those. Your demo is literally the measurement or the sensory perception. There’s no need to visit 10 other booths to find out how to connect devices together.
Was anything missing? Every year someone notices that something that was overly-hyped a year or two earlier simply vanished. Where are the LaserDisc players? Where did Blu-Ray go? What about DisplayPort? Any 3D TV? Aren’t all TVs going to be flexible? Drones? PulseOx meters? Well, there were plenty of flexible displays this year. There were quite a few experiments in 3D-ish displays too. Definitely fewer drones (though TBH most of those we saw in the past were 90% the same BOM from a few companies). This year? I’d say voice control is in a bit of a hibernation. Again, I’m sure someone will write about the recent org changes at Amazon’s Alexa group, but in many ways this is another consolidation taking place. There was definitely a lack of emphasis on voice control. What this means though is that fewer devices are building in their own speakers and microphones and much more likely to be controlled by voice via the mobile platform directly. So instead of talking to the oven you just talk to your phone, watch, or speaker. In other words, the platform and approach stabilized. Maybe there is less but it also means the future is clearer and where the costs and differentiation go are more understood.
These are all signs of reaching a maturing point in the industry. If you need a network, it is Wi-Fi. If you need a wire, then it is USB-C (in some variant). If you need a video wire, then it is HDMI 2.1. If you connect to other devices, then there’s Bluetooth. There are no proprietary chargers, cables, dongles, and so on. It is a joy. The industry hits these points and stabilizes for a period. We’re in that now. It creates a sense of calm and expectations and a stable platform for innovators to innovate. An example like this just underway and clearly big news at the show has been the rollout of “Matter” for home automation. Every vendor is behind this. It will be a 12–24-month rollout with a lot of frustrated early adopters, but so was HDMI and Wi-Fi. But based on the show, it is here “now”, and the industry ecosystem is assuming it is there and there won’t be a battle over it.
That’s where the industry is when it comes to delivering entertainment, digital health, security, transportation, and more. The show had plenty of meta verse and web3 booths, and those are as early and “Wild West” as you would expect. There are no clear leaders. And like other eras there are even potential leaders who have no presence at the show at all, and so we’re left with booth discussions talking less about what is on the floor and more about “wonder what [Apple] might be doing?”
Some will say that the “reduced” scale of the show reflects the economy and that’s an easy line. Planning this show is not that agile. I’m sure there were some last-minute cancelations, but most of the costs were sunk a year ago and while saving on T&E matters usually companies go ahead anyway. Does it reflect the pandemic? It did not feel that way. If anything, the recent changes in Asia (not just China) almost made it seem like more people came because they could finally leave and return with somewhat less of a potential burden. Is it just because “trade shows are old”? I really don’t think so. Like “work from home” there was a view 2 years ago that trade shows, like buffets and handshakes, would go away forever. I don’t think that is generally shared. Gatherings will be more focused for a while, but they remain a valuable part of innovation and commerce, IMO.
I am not one to wish for the old days. As much as I was energized and exhausted by the 200,000 person show spread all over town, there were actually fewer experiments — 100 different USB memory sticks, 50 companies making low-quality Bluetooth headphones, or re-badges of the same portable media player from Shenzhen are not interesting (though the logistics of all that remain impressive). Maybe in a few years there will be another explosion in interest driving more people to attend, but I think the level of innovation on display was as high as ever and so I leave less dehydrated and as energized as ever.
I’m going to run through the main themes I felt and show some of the photos. I’m not here to generate leads or press but most everything can be found pretty easily. I’m just one person and even as I tried to be systematic, I have no intention of competing with the outlets that have tens of people attending every briefing and getting all the press kits. I just show up and start attending.
My main themes:
- Opening Keynote
- Televisions/Screens
- Health
- Robots
- Solar
- Mirrorless Cameras
- Sensors and Sensors as products
- Transportation
- PCs and Wi-Fi
- “Gadgets”
AMD Keynote
The opening keynote has a bit of a rarified place in the history of the show. There’s a long list of “firsts” shown in these keynotes and a lot of famous CEO presenters. Bill Gates showed Xbox for the first time in 2000 (along with the TabletPC, both of which are described in Hardcore Software). This year marked a return of Lisa Su the CEO, president, and Chair of AMD. Of all the major tech CEOs and companies today, Su and AMD are at the center of many of developments most exciting to the industry represented at CES. AMD runs gaming consoles, gaming PCs, PCs, and laptops, and provides chips for machine learning and running cloud workloads. Combine this with Su’s matter of fact yet entertaining stage presence and technologist-at-heart approach to describing products and the keynote can be quite compelling. Su is by far the most commanding tech leader today, at least among those willing to speak at a third-party conference.
At the same time, the place in the “stack” where AMD sits makes it rather challenging for AMD to spend an hour talking about their own work. Thousands of people in a huge room can only take so much talk of die size and transistor counts. Su makes fun of this at the end of each section by doing the obligatory photo-op holding up a chip as if we can see the power curves by looking at the surface area of a microprocessor or graphics card.
To counter this, most of the time platform technology companies use their keynotes to show off the innovations of partners and their ecosystems. There was a defined structure to the keynote as each partner was invited up followed by a bit of banter, then a verbal press release for current work, complete with visuals. Then Su would ask for “a few nuggets” (or language like that) about what is coming. The partners would do a bit of staged “oh we’re not ready to talk” and then proceed with the scripting talking about. AMD did not shy away from this approach one bit :-) Microsoft’s Panos Panay was up first talking about the partnership with AMD in delivering Surface, including a bit of a tip on the focus on AI (and thus the compute power of AMD) in future products. Then came HP describing their “thin mobile” (aka laptops) running the latest low(er) power AMD chips. Lenovo followed with a focus on laptop and desktop gaming as they announced a new line at the show. Peggy Johnson, CEO of MagicLeap, described the work they are doing with AMD (MagicLeap had one of the more crowded demo booths in the meta verse sections as they are clearly well ahead of every other player in AR which is something to watch).
The overall show had a pre-announced focus on healthcare and within the AMD keynote there was a focus on where AMD powers some innovative tools in healthcare, which require processing power. There was a video demo of surgical robots, for example.
Su rounded out the one-hour section talking about the data center and doing a classic chip company head-to-head of the latest EPYC versus XEON. These battles matter a lot and currently AMD is taking share from Intel and given the unit volumes (20M a year) and concentration of hyper scale cloud buyers this matters a huge amount. The numbers for the latest DC chip, a chip with both a data center CPU and a GPU, are crazy — 400 TOPS, consuming 75 watts, with about 146 BILLION transistors on a crazy 3D stacked package. They have been talking about this chip for a year now and will finally ship in H2 2023. If you’re looking for a comparison, the Apple M2 Ultra ship is about 20B transistors and consumes about 20 watts.
TV
The first thing I noticed walking into the main hall was what wasn’t there — there were not masses of people shoulder-to-shoulder stopped dead in their tracks at some insane number of TVs occupying a massive exhibit. The TV, the staple of the consumer electronics show, seemed to recede a bit this year. I tend to think this is because they really gum up booths and flow of people while taking a lot of space. It definitely isn’t for lack of progress or innovation in TVs.
The one exception to this was Korea’s LG which had an absolutely insane display of 250 flexible 55” OLED displays making a “universe” canopy. It was nuts. Below is the official photo of the booth since there was no way to capture this with all the people on the floor.
From a technology perspective we can see the march of resolution and refresh rates. By the time most of us buy a new set, there’s a non-zero chance it will be 8K or 4K/240 hertz. The technology will likely be mini-LED or OLED depending on budget (and manufacturer). It is difficult to overstate how amazing these sets all look. They are all incredibly thin, light, nominally bezel-less and just amazing. They all support HDR, HDMI 2.1 (should you be plugging anything into them), and all the appropriate audio and video standards. There’s a lot to love and the price points make these much less stressful purchases than the old “home theater” days.
There were some incredible displays from the 100” high end that every mfg had to the high refresh rate gamer displays.
For me the big story is really the Japanese consumer brands fading a bit (in a worldwide sense) especially Sony and the battle playing out between China and Korea. This is where the technology shifts matter and where the wrong bet can cause a country to lose out on a whole industry if the companies do not react with agility to what appears to win in the market. At the same time, these bets are all 5–10 years in the making and require massive capital outlay.
One can see this play out in a small way with what at first seems like an odd and out-of-place focus on “laser TV” from China’s HiSense, not even the leader in China. I’ve been following the China TV makers since I lived in China ~20 years ago and they are all an amazing story. In the early 2000s Haier, TCL, and lesser known Chonghong were just getting started. Listening to the CEOs they all were clear and had seen the “playbook” executed by Korea against the Japanese makers to great success in the transition from tube to LCD and had every intention of executing that same play to become leaders in what comes next.
Haier had some wonderfully nice laser TVs on display. These had been showing the past few years at Sony with very expensive and not particularly useful TVs. It seemed odd to me that Haier was so invested in laser — these are TVs that project from a very short distance in front a wall (with a “screen” hanging on the wall). The advantage is “no pixels” with high refresh and reasonable viewing parameters all for a relatively low cost compared to a 100” LED. I was curious as to why they were making such a big deal out of these. Some googling around and I stumbled on a recent “directive” from the government that China should lead in Laser TV — industrial policy! It wasn’t random that we were seeing this.
TCL is the most interesting story to me as they have executed on the relentless playbook. In a decade their TVs have gone from “junk” (my word) to at least worth a shot and in many cases the price point and quality are hitting a sweet spot which is why these so dominate discounters around the world like WalMart. TCL plays no favorites in supporting both Roku and Google/Chromecast/Android/Youtube TV (confusing).
The interesting thing about all the TVs is the software. As is becoming increasingly clear there is no buying a TV without an OS and worse there’s no using a TV without that OS getting in the way. If you’re unlucky enough to have an LG tv connected to an Apple TV then you’re familiar with the complete inability to keep the TV OS from producing notifications about shows, channels, updates, and so on. And you know you have to keep the LG remote around to make these go away. GRRRR.
So regardless of your own wishes you’re buying into the software of the maker. I’ve started using Youtube TV for my Gen-X linear viewer (gotta watch I Want My 80s and Magnum PI) and have had really good experiences with Sony that build that in. Then I don’t need any boxes at all and the remote works.
BUT that is only if you get a high-end model. The low-end models suffer from just being slow. Across all the TVs this is something noticed when playing around with them on the floor — they are SLOW. The software, either Roku, Google, LG, Samy, all outpaces the processor and memory on the devices. This has to change. It is also clear that the apps are becoming increasingly uneven in terms of features and updates — access to 4K, the newest UI, and so on.
All in all, the image and sound on TVs is far outstripping the streaming signal we are all getting and the real-world viewing environment we all experience, but the software experience still makes owning a TV a potentially frustrating choice and experience. I am not optimistic this will get better — it is the crapware cycle.
Not all the cool TVs were big. There’s clearly demand for tiny projectors. Across Sony, Korea, and many independents there are a plethora of “portable speaker sized” TVs displaying 1080P images of good quality on any flat surface, usually with a battery. Usually, they call these micro-displays. They always show these TVs with a tent and sleeping bag which might be the scenario now that any conference room will have an easy-to-use panel. They also show them in basements or places where you can’t have a permanent TV but have a white wall. These made a big splash a few years ago (before sales calls could assume easy to use projection at customer visits) but I’m not quite sure where these are getting used now.
An area that used to take up a whole corner of the South Hall (which was boothless this year) were universal remotes. Heck, even Microsoft partnered with Harmon-Kardon and released a Microsoft branded remote one year, programmable via a PC and serial cable. Mostly gone are the mysteries of learning infrared signals across remotes or finding reverse engineered codes on the internet (Philips Pronto) especially now with HDMI CEC by and large working if you don’t muck with any settings. In fact, if you connect an Appletv or Chromecast it is kind of amazing how well this all works. This is all especially true now that we’re not using numbers or even DVR controls for the most part. Yay!
Still there is innovation. Universal Remote, or now UEI, showed off a new remote that uses an indoor “solar” panel and other super ultra-low voltage components to essentially never need batteries. Super cool. And it works out of the box with ATV, Roku, and Google*. As usually with this company the direct-to-consumer version is a ways out as they are primarily an OEM company. These indoor solar panels have made their way onto many more PC keyboards as well, long after Logitech pioneered the use years ago.
Health
I would say by far the largest (by number of booths) and most diverse area of innovation was in healthcare. A lazy story would be that this is pandemic related or part of some “aging demographic”. I tend to think it is more because finally there is an openness in the whole health industry to patients (us) taking charge of our own preventative care and monitoring and because the technology, particularly sensors and machine learning, are coming online at the same time.
That said, there is *a lot* of stuff out there that is complete and utter nonsense. I don’t think any of it is harmful, but it certainly doesn’t do anything — I for one and tired of getting yelled at as I pass by booths showing light bulbs to shine on my head to grow hair. But many of the devices are not so benign and meaningless as that. There were many devices centered around Alzheimer’s, measuring blood glucose, improving hearing, and more that are not based on any proven research. Snoring and prevention thereof have long been the target of many of these tools. It turns out there is progress here and some potential solutions backed by science are appearing. Some low-tech solutions are making use of the microphone and sound processing advances from mobile. For example, the Motion Pillow from 10minds.com listens for snoring and then moves some rollers around on the pillow to gently nudge you (much like a partner next to you might) to change positions. Old school meets new tech.
Part of this is simply optimism from the makers and part of it is that there should be an openness to crazy ideas. I would not want the show to screen these out but perhaps if they just had one section called “crazy stuff” it would be better.
OPINION: This year’s big one in that regard was a wave of home urine testing and monitoring. This is one of the oldest “tests” in medicine going as far back as the practice of medicine goes. While there’s no doubt medical value in urine, it is not the diagnostic tool being touted. The new innovation is to place these inside toilets, hanging on the side, and somehow you relieve yourself on them without making a huge mess and though AI or something they guess which member of the family is providing a sample. This is an incredibly noisy measurement of a pretty unreliable test. But because it is “connected” it also charts graphs and provides notifications. One app showed a graph of “Vitamin C” which could easily make you feel like you’re “losing vitamins” without explaining water soluble intake. Most routine preventative medicine visits have opted out of urine testing because it is such a noisy signal. Part of what is going on is that the FDA does not need to get involved in this test given it is non-invasive and non-clinical. Outside of pregnancy and drug use which provide obvious outlier signals it isn’t clear to me that tracking this one is a priority. But if you want there are standard dipsticks (and optical readers) on Amazon that are much easier to maintain, get cleaner samples, and clean up after.
Diabetes is a huge worldwide health problem. Many reading this are touched by this one way or another. Many have also tried Levels and learned about how to minimize spikes and the benefits of different foods (or risk of different foods). A non-invasive way to monitor blood sugar continues to evade inventors. There have been many attempts at wrist-based lasers, contact lenses, and ultrasound approaches. The patches were the first major advance in decades, but those remain invasive. The continuous nature of the patch has been a huge win in care. That leaves the show floor to have many attempts at non-invasive techniques. One on exhibit was “Glucosound” which was a special watch with sensors. The watch used sound to excite the glucose in your blood and then an acoustic sensor to “hear” the excited vibrations of those molecules and then “AI” to get an indication of the number of molecules passing by. It is not yet a product but an example of the kind of complexity of invention going into trying to measure this critical piece of body chemistry.
Circulatory measurement, blood pressure and heart rhythm, have started to combine into devices. Many of us have used Apple Watch for an ECG to look for signs of afib. Omron, long time pioneers in blood pressure measurement and management, showed off new cuffs that also have ECG leads to do this same type of measurement. We don’t see these devices as much as we should in the US, but any visit to an electronics store in Asia would have dozens of BP cuffs of all form factors on display.
The show had countless exercise gadgets all of which are now connected: bikes, treadmills, weights, jump ropes, yoga mats, safety gear like helmets, and more. The lowly old treadmill from Kingsmith “shrunk” and became foldable. I ran on it, and it seemed to be great. It was 1/4th the size of a typical treadmill and folded in half and could easily move around. No Bluetooth, no heart rate monitor, etc. Let your watch do those things. Nice. See https://www.kingsmithfitness.com/products
A product getting a lot of eyerolls was “Rollkers” which were designed for commuters who walk but enabled them to get there faster. They look like clip on roller skates but incorporate a unique wheel/tread so you’re not actually rolling around uncontrollably. Apparently, you can even walk on stairs. A lot of people at the booth kind of mumbled “roller skates, you’ve invented roller skates”
Health was on display not just for humans. Our fur babies have their own connected gadgets. Amongst the now common connected litter boxes and toys, I loved a service being shown that basically does facial recognition for pets. Snap a photo and add it to their database. If someone finds your pet and there’s a QR code, then they too can snap a photo and match it. Nice.
Robots
There were a lot a lot of robots on the floor. There wasn’t really a robot area exactly so what was amazing is that I’d just be walking along and poof another booth with a robot. This was one of the more exciting areas for me because there’s clearly going to be a ton of work that goes into productizing robots and all of that is building on the silicon innovation over the past two decades and now the mobile phone provides a platform to easily interface with the robot and to assist training them. Most all the robots are using cameras, sensors, and some form of adaptive learning.
While many thought of robots in the sense of Rosie the Robot taking over, it is clear that we’re going to see a massive rise in special purpose / single purpose tools in the near-medium term.
On the other hand, this is all one step close to Skynet.
I just wanted to list some of the form factors that go beyond Roomba/vacuum and floor cleaners that have become so ubiquitous.
- Back assist. There were a number of “bionic” robots designed around helping warehouse workers (when those are not robots) and also for those needing assistance in mobility. These are essentially lightweight and partial exoskeletons.
- Warehouse. The warehouse robot being shown frequently was a small platform featuring autonomous guidance for moving items round a relatively fixed location. Some are “low tech” and follow paths laid out on a warehouse floor and others are given instructions or beacons to follow via QR codes they can scan. Several times I saw these proposed as “room service” or “hospital room” delivery platforms.
- Delivery. Home deliver robots were much like the warehouse ones but designed for navigation in the wild. In the Bay Area we see these being tested out quite frequently. Much of the innovation goes into how to secure the package and prevent the whole robot from being lifted onto a truck.
- Bartending/Barista. There are robots and automated machines (with articulating arms) for making drinks and brewing coffee.
- Lawn mower. I think I saw a half dozen law mowing robots. Now if they could only figure out how to get the clippings into the compost bin (none of them even bag the clippings).
- Watch kids. Robots that watch your kids and pets seem a bit too close to Skynet to me even though they are mostly just about the camera though one had some interactive elements on a tablet screen “face”.
- Security. A number of robots were shown for indoor or outdoor monitoring of commercial buildings and grounds. These are basically eyes and ears commanded/controlled by someone in a bunker somewhere.
- Scout Crops. While the presence of drones was significantly less this year there were several purpose-built drones. One was from a French company (in the France innovation hub) that looked really spooky — kind of like a spike protein with a bunch of cameras. It was designed to scout crops and look for various agricultural anomalies.
- Inside pipes. Autonomous pipe inspection robots aren’t totally new, but they are getting smaller and smarter.
- Dentist. By far the creepiest robot was one that did dentistry. It was an articulating arm that claimed to reduce dental discomfort and errors. I sent to a dentist friend and got one word back “Yikes”.
Solar and Batteries
It was difficult to miss the endless array of solar powered gadgets, battery backup batteries/energy storage, and combinations. The weirdest wordplay is that these are often called “generators” now which I guess makes sense but seems weird.
The batteries range from 12v auto battery size to 5000+ watts on wheels featuring 220v output. The common thread is now stitching these together to provide large amounts of power for off-grid use or home/dwelling backup. They can be built out for home, commercial, or off-grid use. Jackery is a company that seems to have taken over for Yeti which took over for iGo. I’m sure there is an industry report that does market share. But ultimately these are all batteries and only nominally even connected. It is just evidence of the fragile world we live in now that there is so much effort going into backing up the over-taxed electrical grid.
Most of the battery makers have solar panels as well. Matching the capacity of the batteries with the ability to recharge them is a step missing in the all the marketing. It isn’t clear one could really recharge some of the stacks on display as fast as they could be depleted.
But so, so many batteries.
Mirrorless Photography
CES is not Photokina, the German trade show for the photo industry but it has always had a good set of photography related booths owing to the retail and distribution channels at the show. This year many of the photo accessory booths seemed MIA but we were left with more prominent booths from Nikon and Canon. Sony was mostly focused on their professional video cameras. There is a fabulous three-way contest across these three, with both the high end and low end up for grabs and perhaps going to different vendors. It is a really fantastic innovation space.
The only challenge is all three face what amounts to a shrinking market. The number of non-phone cameras continues to decline while the number of photos continues to grow exponentially.
Sony was first with mirrorless and has been growing out an extensive line of pro level lenses. Canon has a 60% or more share of “professionals” (perhaps 80% on the sidelines of the World Cup or Olympics) but was second with mirrorless to Nikon. But Nikon has been slower with optics. This is a long battle. Canon is the incumbent for pros. The big thing is whether new mirrorless photographers can be captured as they switch platforms or if the existing ones will simply go with the user-interface and button-arrangement they know from the DSLR world. A fascinating battle. A while back I wrote about the disruption between Nikon and Canon — https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/nikon-versus-canon-a-story-of-technology-change-45777098038c
Nikon is currently the leader in the consumer and “pro-sumer” space (less expensive) having ceded the lead to Canon just prior to the transition to digital. They recently shipped a low-end mirrorless for “creators” which is almost a point and shoot level camera optimized for “vlogging”. For what it does it is expensive (I have one). Nikon had a model of a new 85mm f1.2 lens which had been rumored.
All the makers are capital constrained to some degree given the shrinking market. It is fascinating. Reading the quarterly earnings is brutal.
The other interesting angle is video which for professional is a different platform. Canon and Sony have really focused on providing entirely different ergonomic platforms (and lenses) for video. Nikon has mostly ceded that market. This is a higher margin lower volume space than still cameras.
Canon had a new “hybrid” body that has an SLR form factor, but user interface tuned to video. This is a combination of their two lines — the still line and the “C” or cinema line. They also had their “VR” lens which is a goggle-eyed pair of fisheye lenses (not totally new but part of the demo). Sony’s pro cameras are incredible. All these compete with super high end (expensive) “cinema” cameras like Red, Arri, and Blackmagic.
The most amazing thing is just how early it is and how they are all just building out the optics to go with mirrorless. It is so early that there have only been a few lenses that represent innovations taking advantage of the change in mechanics brought on by mirrorless (for example, Nikon’s long lenses made smaller using fluorite and Canon with the 28–70/2).
Canon had a nifty software add-on called “Webcam Studio” which takes any number of EOS still cameras and plugs them into the PC over USB and then you can composite those into a single image which shows up as a virtual camera. It is a way to do some minimal product and feed that to Zoom without having to use OBS.
Canon also showed a conference room camera called “Hybrid Active Conference Camera” which combines a PTZ (pan tilt zoom) camera with great microphones with software that is easy for the attendees to drive. It adds a whiteboard and switching to essentially make a collaborative meeting work more efficiently.
Sensors
I’m using sensors broadly to include not just body measurements or environmental measurements but all the cameras of the visual and IR field as well. I think it is interesting to consider “sensing” as a space to itself because almost everything will combine all these modes.
For example, many traffic sensors provide air quality monitoring as well. Most scales are starting to incorporate body composition and even some minimal environmental sensing at weigh-in.
I described healthcare above but at the risk of double covering an area I did want to make a list of highlighting some (most) the many sensors I saw. It is really incredible just how much of the physical world can now be detected and transmitted to your phone or the cloud. I think the most important product lesson here is how companies with sensors are able to focus their energy on “sensing” and not building out a whole proprietary stack. Part of the magic of CES is that you can now see who there is a sensor “market” and many larger companies are on the lookout for sensors.
When it comes to healthcare, CES is not the show to look for medical grade sensing. With few exceptions nothing here is about the hospital or doctor’s office. In fact, it is the opposite, it is about how to come out with a product that is used at home for preventative care of consulting with a doctor for follow up. These companies all actively avoid the need for device approval, by and large. This is also why there are sensors for “air quality” but not sensors for specific germs or even bacteria or anything.
Most all of these we now see on Apple Health connected ins some form: sleep, body composition, blood pressure, heart rate, temp, SpO2, etc. I didn’t see any new measurements.
The most interesting two I saw were:
Ultrasound — This is a medical device but there are many uses for ultrasound that don’t require too much training such as checking for full bladder for a bed-ridden person under your care. The portable ultrasound is now a “thing” and can be found in doctors’ offices and research labs. Several were on display.
Vision — most of us who have gone in for eye exams know they use several connected gadgets to check vision (visual acuity, color, reading, field, etc.) These tests continue to get compressed into fewer devices. There are now devices where there is an iPad app that does all the reporting and capture so all you need is a stationary device to rest your chin on. To make these even cheaper one company even created a monocular version where you move it between eyes rather than just blocking out one eye.
All of these really start to make one think about privacy though. All this deeply personal data in one place and so easily abused whether for employment, insurance, or just to exploit.
That said, by far the biggest “flag” for me was just the sheer number of visual monitoring/cameras I saw and especially how they all get shown as “this is available only to qualified law enforcement or government”. Primarily this is because there are so many license plate cameras and face identification cameras that require state-maintained databases. Normalizing all this surveillance kind of bugs me and at the same time this is not getting toned down. We all want safe streets, but the question is whether this is the right tool and actually helps.
One of the most elaborate was an all-in-one police light (the red-blue flashers) that had multiple cameras for doing license plate ID, facial rec, and event capture. It is connected via 5G to the central police system, and all done real time.
There were several “China” camera systems that are used for security in open spaces that identify and track individuals as they walk around. To my sensitivities these have the worst Minority Report user interfaces.
At the consumer level, home security cameras keep getting better and easier to install. The low-end Home Guard system has a PoE setup now and the cameras include their own flashing blue and red lights presumably to scare the bad guys when they are detected. Happy Halloween!
Some big consumer camera news was from Amazon Ring which was a new dashcam that becomes part of your “ring of protection”. It can let you monitor your car from 360° via a camera that clips on top of your dash on a bit of an arm that attaches to the windshield. The demos didn’t show the cable which bugged me since it needs to route around or you need to do some cowl unclipping. It is quick and easy and connected though.
One type of sensor is location along with all the environmental needs for sport — running, hiking, mountaineering, diving, etc. Garmin has long been a leader in these. They are a fascinating company in that they have been called “disrupted” by the Apple Watch but yet they are by all accounts thriving at about $5B a year. Their secret is that they are a deep commercial company as well. They equip cockpits, truck cabins, boats, and more. At the same time, they continue to push their vision with consumer watches. At CES they unveiled a second-generation high end (> $2000) “Garmin” called the MARQ Adventure series. It is fancy!
Transportation
Perhaps about 10 years ago CES became something of a “car show” back when the strategy of cars was to incorporate more electronics for entertainment and navigation. What it interesting is how with CarPlay and Android Auto the need for car mfg to make these parts vanished (along with the margin). Somehow the idea that EV cars are really computers stuck and so the car makers continue to come to CES. It’s a bit of a stretch since cars have been filled with computers for decades. Will the next generation be in house or not? Will doing so be a competitive advantage or a losing play?
In any event, all the cars on display now are EV. The big surprise and the buzz were that the future EVs mostly look like today’s gas cars. People want pickups and SUVs that look like today’s cars but electric.
What is interesting is that much like TVs that continue to have poor software experiences we don’t need, the presence of the big screen in all these EV models is driving a move to have no physical controls. This feels “Apple like” and of course Tesla-like but we’re also facing surprising increases in motor vehicle accidents in the US even with the pandemic. Is this because of phones or are screen user interfaces contributing? And given that car makers took decades to hone the physical UI are they going to take a decade to hone a digital UI? I’m worried.
There were EV boats, planes, motorcycles, scooters (of course) and most of all bikes. A lot of EV bikes. Seattle is filled with hills so no argument from me about pedal assist. The thing is that these bikes are getting BIG and HEAVY. They are basically motorcycles but to keep clear of being licensed as such they keep their pedals. I have skepticism here too because these large sized e-bikes are really dangerous when mixed with pedestrians and regular bikes. I’ve already had a few near misses in Seattle when people ride them on sidewalks even with ample bike lanes and I’ve watched more than one intersection wipeout because these just can’t stop quickly enough. But they are getting bigger and bigger. Scooters continue to get bigger and faster as well.
The big competitive battle going on is to build out the EV charging grid. There’s a ton of jockeying going into trying to be a standard. The EU is busy defining standards as are countries in the EU. The US just kicked off a federal program.
For fleets there are also solutions out there. Enercamp showed a mobile EV charger, primarily for parking lots which might save on having a charger in every spot. It includes robots, wireless attachment, modular batteries, and staffed and unstaffed cars moving batteries/charge to vehicles.
There’s no doubt EV is the future for most all transit. At the passenger car/truck space the leadership is going to be fascinating. Disruption is not always as clean or fast as many think. At the micro-mobility level, I think the current trajectory for e-bikes and scooters where they are becoming like SUVs has all the same challenges SUVs have here in the US when it comes to sharing space with smaller (more practical) vehicles. Urban is going to play out a lot differently than rural further accentuating the divisions we seem to be living with.
PCs and Wi-Fi
PCs had a very tough 2022 and look to be set up for a tough 2023. CES was never really a PC show but from 1995–2010 the PC was such a huge part of the economy and growth they ended up a huge part of CES.
PCs are much more about work and much less about “consumer” these days. CES being a show that is about distribution and retail as well, PCs still have an important place because about 40–50% of PCs are bought by home and small business at “retail”.
There were no PC booths like in previous years and even the PC makers that used to have their open-to-attendees “hospitality” spaces skipped those for press conferences and dedicated events. I think this will be permanent. But you never know.
Microsoft had a dedicated space on the floor (which is a return to the floor) and was showing off gaming. Razer’s booth was as exciting as ever.
Perhaps the PC news getting the most attention was the Lenovo dual screen PC. I’m not bullish on dual screen devices especially for PCs because I don’t think the PC use cases really work without a real keyboard and trackpad. But at CES a breakout form factor always gathers attention.
Given the presence of gaming on the floor, there was no shortage of gamer monitors. There’s still a significant number of curved monitors which are now focused entirely on immersive gaming.
By far the most interesting PC development for me was the “blue light reduction” displays. These are a new type of LED that aims to reduce fatigue by reducing the amount of blue light used. TCL (!) has such a display in their paper-like tablet and ChomreOS or Windows 11 convertible (running Qualcomm). They have been talking about this display for 2+ years and finally seeing it in units coming to market (display tech always seems to do that because the journey from model to scaled manufacturing is bumpy with challenges like yield). I *really* liked the look of the display. I have no idea what it might be like outdoors (where I seem to be a lot). It was also tough to get a sense of performance because the units were not connected to wi-fi so I could not play videos. They were sluggish because they were running Windows on ARM on QC SD 7c which is probably underpowered for Windows (it was just marginal on ChromeOS). A pioneer of these displays is Eyesafe DTX which holds much of the IP for this area.
It is worth mentioning Wi-Fi in this section just for history even though most Wi-Fi is for mobile and configuring on phones anyway. The consumer Wi-Fi space is focused on Wi-Fi 7 and to some extent gamers now and with that the access points are just huge (and ugly). I’m not sure what to make of it. I was talking to someone on the floor at one of the makers. I made a joke about ugly artwork on top of a credenza, and they told me about the aftermarket on Etsy of “Wi-Fi router holders” and sure enough there’s a whole bunch of little wood cabinets with holes for antenna to pop out. At least TP link has some super flat access points and there’s a growing list of PoE ceiling APs for home and small business.
I only briefly mentioned Matter, the new standard for home automation. There was a ton of news in this area where most every maker of switches, plugs, etc. announced support. The routers as well are committed to routing the packets.
Gadgets
Finally, no CES report would be complete without just listing some of the gadgets and accessories that I saw. Not all of these are new or even new to me, but it is fun to see them up close without buying them. There were fewer of these this year because the number of booths with one gadget went down.
Kodak Shoot & Print. These cameras have been around and are top sellers on Amazon. They aren’t cheap nor are the consumables cheap. They are fun though! It is a modern polaroid. These are really digital cameras (10mp) and “printers” that make 3x4 or 3x2 prints from the camera or via Bluetooth from any phone. Super fun.
Vessel house. I’m walking around the solar and sustainability area and there’s a trailer. But it looks more like what you’d see in a movie about living on the moon. It’s an energy efficient (but not off grid) instant house. It was just fascinating to go inside and think about uses for this and if it was cost effective (they would not tell me the cost).
Invzi docks. I like the wedge style USB docks for PC and Mac. There are a lot of these that are all similar. This one has a slot for an M.2 SSD (comes with an enclosure) and has magnets that hold the wedge in place. https://invzi.com/collections/new-products/products/invzi-maghub-pop-up-ssd-usb-c-hub-for-macbook-pro-macbook-air
Graphene kitchen styler. In the innovation area (startups) was a wild “oven” that used graphene to boil water and make toast. Graphene is a great conductor.
Charg-R (incubation). Also in the innovation area was a one-person inventor from Ireland (North) that had a single use but “green” emergency battery with an 18-month shelf life. Basically, about half a charge in a non-toxic safe cardboard container. He wouldn’t tell me the chemistry but really needs capital to make it. He decided two weeks ago to attend, 3D printed a prototype and did all the booth construction himself. I love CES!
Metl bike wheel / tires. Forever the transportation industry has tried to commercialize the tires used on the moon-car. This is a run at using the technology to make e-bike tires.
Hyperpack Pro. A backpack with an Apple FindMy tag built in. Just neat to see the ecosystem build up around these.
Rolling Square Card. A wallet card with Apple FindMy built in. It is about 2.5 credit cards thick.
Rolling Square 4/6-in-1 cables inCharge XL. From the same company, cables of varying length that have Lightning/C on one end and C/A on the other. The cables fold together nicely into a little loop that stays closed with a magnet. Available on Amazon.
GE Profile Mixer. “disrupt baking”. I can’t make this up.
Cooler that makes ice cubes. A portable cooler that also makes ice and can make a tray of ice in 30 minutes. From the “everything has a battery” department.
WiPhone. wiphone.io/flier.PDF — From the innovators area was this one-person inventor shop that made a super privacy phone. It is essentially a shell of a smartphone (you can write your own apps, but not use any other apps) running its own OS that only does VOIP with E2E encryption on his own service. It was really designed as a test product but he’s so into it he wants to sell it as a privacy phone. Buy one for each person you want to talk to, don’t insert a SIM, and only talk or text over Wi-Fi. No tracking. No pinging.
— Steven Sinofsky (January 8, 2023)
