Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

The big CES yawn

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in the USA is where techy manufacturers roll out their new products and concepts to an eager press and public.

This year, to be totally honest, I didn't see much that made me go "wow".

Oh, just in case some are under the illusion that I attended the show in person, no. Such luxuries are not for me. I am simply going from reports in the media.

The only slightly interesting new TV on show was a transparent LED system -- although I'm struggling to understand why this would be useful, at least as a replacement for the 55-inch dumb LCD screen I have hooked up to the GoogleTV Chromecast device in our living room.

Even the EV companies seem to be a bit lost for "must have" features this year, as can be seen by Sony and Honda's attempts to wow.

Who wouldn't want to be able to turn the bumper on their new EV into an electronic billboard?.

What are they thinking?

I also have to wonder if my perception of "beauty" has changed in respect to concept-cars after seeing the Honda Space-Hub. This has to be the ugliest looking concept I've seen in a very long time. I thought concept cars were supposed to "wow", not induce feelings of nausea.

NVIDIA failed to wow with the annoucement of its "super" refresh of the RTX4000 series of graphics cards (yawn) and it doesn't seem that there's much else in the computer arena that will spin anyone's wheels.

The one gadget that did gain some traction however, is this AI powered gadget, albeit perhaps it's more of a fad than a portent of future direction. One can't help but think that all of this functionality could be added to existing smartphone tech and thus the Rabbit might become redundant very quickly. Nobody needs even more crap to carry around with them do they?

Surprisingly, there was very little in the way of new drone tech this year. DJI announced their turnkey delivery drone, the FlyCart30 but with regulations being as restrictive as they presently are, I don't see any significant market for this product outside of third-world countries and China itself.

It looks as if Virtual Reality (VR) headsets are still a thing too. Not only has Apple announced that it's going ahead with its product but Sony also debuted its R product designed to compete head-on with the few other offerings in the market. The price-point still makes these things something that are unlikely to take off for a few generations yet.

Whilst in this arena, who remembers Google Glass?

Well it seems that some concepts just never die and now Xreal has produced a somewhat similar product in the form of the Air 2 Ultra AR glasses. We'll just have to wait and see if they can make it happen from a commercial perspective.

Perhaps I'm just getting old and jaded but I can't help feeling that things are slowing somewhat in the tech world. The changes have become more evolutionary than revolutionary and we've reached the point where manufacturers are adding trivial, pointless features instead of boosting core functionality or delivering breakthrough change.

Ah... it's probably just Covid-fallout, yeah, that'll be it!

Carpe Diem folks!

Please visit the sponsor!

PERMALINK to this column

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font