The vacation season has barely begun, however a few of us are already preparing for CES 2025. Shortly after New 12 months’s Day, many from the Engadget group might be packing our baggage to fly to Las Vegas, the place we’ll be masking tech’s largest annual convention. As standard, our inboxes are already flooded with pitches from firms which can be planning to be there, and our calendars are filling up with appointments for briefings and demos.
Primarily based on our expertise, in addition to commentary of latest trade traits, it’s pretty simple to make educated predictions about what we would see in January. Through the years, the main focus of the convention has spanned areas like TVs, vehicles, good house merchandise and private well being, with a smattering of laptops and equipment thrown in. At CES 2025, we count on to see AI get much more pervasive in all areas of the present ground. However we’re additionally prone to get the standard slew of recent processors and subsequent laptops, in addition to all method of wearables, trackers, lavatory home equipment and therapeutic massage chairs. Oh, the therapeutic massage chairs.
There’s already so much we all know is coming, simply by a cursory look at the lineup printed by the Shopper Know-how Affiliation (CTA). Along with quite a few panels and talks, there might be keynotes by NVIDIA’s founder and CEO Jensen Huang, Delta CEO Ed Bastian in addition to C-suite executives from firms like Panasonic, SiriusXM, Waymo and Volvo group. That provides us a style of who would possibly make massive bulletins on the present.
The truth is, some firms did not even wait until January to make their information identified. LG, for instance, continues its annual custom of sharing its upcoming CES launches weeks forward of the present by unveiling the 2025 refresh for its QNED evo line of LCD TVs. Hyundai Mobis, in the meantime, has stated it will likely be giving us a take a look at its “Holographic Windshield Display,” one thing it is claiming is a world’s first. Hyundai Mobis even shared an image of what its sales space at CES 2025 will appear to be, in case photos of conference heart cubicles get you excited.
In the event you’re already waiting for 2025 and are studiously researching what may be coming in January, right here’s a style of what our group expects to see on the present.
New video playing cards from AMD and NVIDIA
There’s little question 2025 goes to be a momentous yr for PC avid gamers. NVIDIA is predicted to debut its long-awaited RTX 5000 video playing cards at CES, whereas AMD CEO Lisa Su has confirmed we’ll see next-generation RDNA 4 GPUs early subsequent yr. Of the 2 firms, AMD might use the improve extra. Its final batch of Radeon 7000 playing cards have been first rate mid-range performers, however they lagged far behind NVIDIA’s {hardware} when it got here to ray tracing, and AMD’s FSR 3 upscaling additionally couldn’t compete with NVIDIA’s AI-powered DLSS 3.
“In addition to a strong increase in gaming performance, RDNA 4 delivers significantly higher ray-tracing performance and adds new AI capabilities,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said in an October earnings call.
As for NVIDIA’s new hardware, a rumor from the leaker OneRaichu (through DigitalTrends) urged that the RTX 5090 might be as much as 70 % sooner than the RTX 4090. (That’s a GPU that I beforehand described as having “unholy power.”) They also note that other “high level” cards could see 30 to 40 percent performance bumps. Those gains might be enough to tempt wealthy RTX 4090 owners to upgrade, but RTX 4070 and 4080 owners might want to skip this generation. For NVIDIA holdouts with RTX 3000 and earlier GPUs, though, next year may be the perfect time to upgrade. — Devindra Hardawar, senior reporter
AI PCs round 2
Last year, I predicted that AI PCs would dominate CES, and that mostly turned out to be true. As 2024 rolled on, we saw even more powerful NPUs in chips from Intel, AMD and Qualcomm. Microsoft also doubled down on AI PCs with its Copilot+ initiative, which gave a big marketing push for artificial intelligence features and premium specifications (like having at least 16GB of RAM).
Expect more of the same going into CES 2025, alongside even more AI being stuffed into every category of product imaginable. This year, in particular, PC makers are likely to gear up to take advantage of Windows 10 support ending next year. Instead of just upgrading your old computer to Windows 11, the likes of Dell and HP would rather you buy a whole new AI PC with the new OS pre-installed.
While 2024 was a year of endless AI PC hype, 2025 might end up being a year of reckoning. Microsoft’s long-delayed Recall feature is slowly trickling out to more users, but it’s already showing some glaring security holes, like failing to clean social safety and bank card numbers from screenshots. We’ve additionally been principally underwhelmed with Apple Intelligence’s picture era capabilities. PC makers have been keen to speak up the potential of AI-powered options till now, however in 2025 they’ll have to really show they will stay as much as their fantastical claims. — D.H.
Earbuds that follow Apple’s lead on hearing health
I’m fully aware not every audio company has the ability to build out a clinical-grade hearing test and hearing aid features in their apps. However, Apple’s recent update for the AirPods Pro 2 should inspire the competition to offer some form of hearing health tools on their flagship products. Jabra was probably the best equipped to do this since parent company GN has extensive hearing aid experience. Sadly, the company announced earlier this year that it wouldn’t make earbuds anymore.
Samsung and Google could probably integrate something like what Apple made for the AirPods, given both companies’ existing health platforms. If they did, those announcements are unlikely to be made at CES, as both companies prefer to host their own standalone hardware events throughout the year.
That leaves Sennheiser as the biggest audio company that consistently launches earbuds and headphones at CES. Last year, it showcased a number of new fashions, together with one with heart-rate monitoring for exercises. Plus, it already provides listening to help with devoted units just like the true wi-fi Dialog Clear Plus. These earbuds are extra listening to centered than for normal content material consumption, so it will be nice to see Sennheiser carry some options from that product to its flagship Momentum line of earbuds. Perhaps a Momentum True Wireless 4 Pro or Plus is in the cards, but the current model is just nine months old.
Of course, there’s plenty of room for other companies to innovate here, and there will be no shortage of new earbuds in Vegas next month. We also tend to see a ton of assistive units and expertise launch at CES, from main accessibility firms like OrCam and all method of smaller manufacturers. I simply hope among the new tech consists of extra normal listening to instruments on the fashions most individuals will wish to use. — Billy Steele, senior editor
Car electrification goes sky excessive
As the expansion of electrical vehicles nears 10 % of recent fashions bought within the US, it’s simple to neglect that wheeled autos aren’t the one form of transportation seeing the shift to battery-powered propulsion. Flying taxis have been a mainstay of CES for the previous few years, with idea autos from manufacturers as massive as Hyundai dotting the present ground in Vegas.
Granted, these contraptions look extra like large drones with cockpits than something the Jetsons ever dreamed up. However with firms like Archer Aviation and Joby Aviation pledging to really launch eVTOL companies (electrical vertical take-off and touchdown) in 2025, the period of air taxis could have landed for actual this time. — Sam Rutherford, senior reporter
Expanded dialog enchancment options on soundbars
In terms of the primary features of soundbars, there actually isn’t a ton of innovation from yr to yr. Heck, Samsung’s largest replace final yr was the addition of HDMI 2.1 assist to its flagship mannequin, which ought to’ve been there already. Corporations have additionally been centered on the transition to cable-free the whole lot, whether or not that’s wi-fi Dolby Atmos or wi-fi transmission containers. Audio enhancement options are a spot the place firms can actually rise above the fray, and instruments like Sonos’ TV Audio Swap and Bose’s Personal Surround Sound are great examples of this. A key area nearly every company can improve is dialog boost, a feature that raises the volume or separates spoken word from background noise and music for better clarity.
Sonos made a huge leap in this regard on the Arc Extremely, providing two further settings for its so-called Speech Enhancement. Beforehand, this was simply an all-or-nothing toggle, which is how most firms deal with their variations of this device. Not solely is the Sonos replace customizable to a level, it’s additionally simply higher, thanks partly to the redesigned structure of its new premium soundbar. That is an apparent space the place different firms can enhance.
LG and Samsung sometimes announce new soundbars at CES, and there are many smaller firms that may debut some too. I’d like to see all of them take dialog enhancements a step additional and on the very least give a number of choices for the way it’s utilized. LG has been utilizing AI Sound Professional from its TVs since 2021 and Samsung provides one thing known as Adaptive Sound on its house theater audio system. I’d count on them each to usually enhance the standard of their options, however I’m hoping they’ll broaden the capabilities too. — B.S.
Replace, December 17 2024, 12:40PM ET: This story has been up to date to incorporate the businesses and CEOs that might be making keynotes on the present.
Replace, December 20 2024, 11:55AM ET: This story has been up to date to incorporate LG and Hyundai Mobis’ bulletins forward of CES 2025.
