The holiday season has just begun, but some of us are already gearing up for CES 2025. Soon after the New Year, many of the Engadget team will be packing their bags to fly to Las Vegas, where we'll be covering the biggest annual tech festival. conference. As usual, our inboxes are already filled with presentations from companies planning to be there, and our calendars are filled with meetings for briefings and demos.
Based on our experience, as well as our observation of recent industry trends, it's pretty easy to make educated predictions about what we might see in January. Over the years, conference topics have covered areas such as TVs, automobiles, smart home products and personal health, as well as a smattering of laptops and accessories. At CES 2025, we expect AI to become even more pervasive across all areas. exhibition hall. But we'll also likely get the usual plethora of new processors and subsequent laptops, as well as all sorts of wearables, trackers, plumbing and massage chairs. Oh, massage chairs.
We already know a lot of what awaits us, just a quick glance at composition published Consumer Technology Association (CTA). In addition to numerous panel discussions and negotiations, there will be Keynotes from NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen HuangDelta CEO Ed Bastian, as well as senior executives from companies such as Panasonic, SiriusXM, Waymo and the Volvo group. This gives us an idea of who might make big announcements on the show.
In fact, some companies didn't even wait until January to announce their news. LG, for example, continues its annual tradition of revealing upcoming CES launches in the weeks leading up to the show. Introducing the 2025 update to the QNED evo LCD TV lineup. Meanwhile Hyundai Mobis said they would show us their “holographic head-up display.”“What the company claims is a world first. Hyundai Mobis even shared a photo of what its CES 2025 booth will look like, in case the photos of the convention center booths interest you.
If you're already looking ahead to 2025 and scrutinizing what might happen in January, here's a taste of what our team expects to see at the show.
New video cards from AMD and NVIDIA
There's no doubt that 2025 will be a big year for PC gamers. NVIDIA is expected to unveil its highly anticipated RTX 5000 graphics cards at CES, and AMD CEO Lisa Su has confirmed that we'll see. Next generation RDNA 4 GPUs early next year. Of the two companies, AMD could use the update more. His latest batch of Radeon 7000 cards were decent mid-range performers, but they lagged far behind NVIDIA's hardware when it came to ray tracing, and AMD's FSR 3 upscaling also couldn't compete with NVIDIA's AI-powered DLSS 3.
“In addition to significant improvements in gaming performance, RDNA 4 delivers significantly faster ray tracing performance and adds new artificial intelligence capabilities,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said in an October earnings call.
Regarding the new NVIDIA hardware, a rumor from the leader One Raichu (by using DigitalTrends) suggested that the RTX 5090 could be 70 percent faster than the RTX 4090. (This is the GPU I previously described as having “unholy power”.) They also note that on other “high-end” cards, performance can increase by 30 to 40 percent. These benefits may be enough to entice wealthy RTX 4090 owners to upgrade, but RTX 4070 and 4080 owners may want to skip this generation. However, for those moving away from NVIDIA with RTX 3000 and earlier GPUs, next year could be the perfect time to upgrade. — Devindra Hardawar, Senior Reporter
Computers with artificial intelligence, round 2
Last year I predicted that AI computers would dominate CES, and that turned out to be mostly true. In 2024, we'll see even more powerful NPUs in chips from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. Microsoft also doubled its sales of AI computers with the release of his Copilot+ initiativewhich gave a big marketing push to the development of artificial intelligence features and premium characteristics (for example, having at least 16 GB of RAM).
Expect more of the same at CES 2025, with even more artificial intelligence being introduced into every product category imaginable. This year, in particular, PC makers will likely be poised to take advantage of Windows 10 support will end next year. Instead of simply upgrading your old PC to Windows 11, companies like Dell and HP would rather you buy a brand new AI PC with the new OS pre-installed.
While 2024 was the year of endless hype for AI-powered PCs, 2025 could be the year of reckoning. Microsoft's long-delayed revocation feature is slowly rolling out to more users, but it's already showing some glaring security holes, such as failure to remove social security and credit card numbers from screenshots. We were also Generally underwhelmed by Apple Intelligence's imaging capabilities. PC makers have so far been eager to talk up the potential of AI features, but in 2025 they'll have to actually prove they can live up to their fanciful claims. — DH
Headphones that follow Apple's lead on hearing health
I am fully aware that not every audio company has the opportunity to develop Clinical hearing testing and hearing aid function in your applications. However, Apple's recent update to the AirPods Pro 2 should encourage competitors to offer some form of hearing health tools in their flagship products. Jabra was probably best positioned to do this, as parent company GN has extensive experience in hearing aids. Unfortunately, earlier this year the company announced that They won't make headphones out of it anymore..
Samsung and Google could probably integrate something like what Apple did for AirPods, given both companies' existing healthcare platforms. If they did, these announcements would likely not have been made at CES, as both companies prefer to hold their own standalone hardware events throughout the year.
This leaves Sennheiser as the largest audio company to continually introduce in-ear headphones at CES. Last year he demonstrated several new modelsincluding heart rate tracking for training. In addition, it already offers hearing support through dedicated devices such as a true wireless system. Conversation Clear Plus. These headphones are more focused on hearing than general content consumption, so it would be great if Sennheiser brought some of the features of this product to their product. flagship line of headphones Momentum. There may be plans for a Momentum True Wireless 4 Pro or Plus, but the current model is only nine months old.
Of course, there's plenty of room for other companies to innovate here, and there won't be any shortage of new headphones in Vegas next month. We also tend to see mass Presentation of assistive devices and technologies at CESfrom major accessibility companies like OrKam and all sorts of smaller brands. I just hope that some of the new technologies include more general purpose hearing aids that most people will want to use. — Billy Steele, Senior Editor
Vehicle electrification is advancing rapidly
As the rise of electric vehicles approaches 10 percent of new models sold In the US, it's easy to forget that wheeled vehicles aren't the only mode of transportation seeing a shift to battery-powered propulsion. Flying taxis have been a mainstay at CES for the past few years, featuring concept vehicles from major brands such as Hyundai dotted the Vegas show floor.
Of course, these inventions look more like giant drones with cockpits than anything the Jetsons ever dreamed of. But with companies like Archer Aviation And Joby Aviation promising to launch eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) services in 2025, the era of air taxis may be here for real this time. — Sam Rutherford, senior reporter
Enhanced dialogue enhancement features on soundbars.
When it comes to the basic aspects of soundbars, there really isn't much innovation year on year. Heck, Samsung's biggest update last year was adding HDMI 2.1 support to its flagship model, which should have already been there. Companies are also focusing on moving everything to wireless connectivity, be it wireless Dolby Atmos or wireless transmission boxes. Audio enhancement features are where companies can really rise above the situation, and tools like Replacing Sonos TV sound And Bose Personal Surround Sound are perfect examples of this. A key area that almost every company could improve is dialogue enhancement, a feature that increases the volume or separates the spoken word from background noise and music for greater clarity.
Sonos has taken a huge step forward in this regard. Arc Ultraoffering two additional settings for so-called speech enhancement. It used to be just an all-or-nothing switch, and that's how most companies handle their versions of this tool. Not only is the Sonos update somewhat customizable, it's also better, thanks in part to the redesigned architecture of the new premium soundbar. This is an obvious area where other companies can improve.
LG and Samsung usually announce new soundbars at CES, and there are plenty of smaller companies that will be introducing them too. I wish they all went further to improve the dialogue and at least provide some options for using it. LG has been using AI Sound Pro in its TVs since 2021, and Samsung offers technology called Adaptive Sound for its home theater speakers. I expect them both to generally improve the quality of their features, but I hope they also expand the capabilities. — BS
Update December 17, 2024 12:40 pm ET: This story has been updated to include the companies and executives who will be keynote speakers at the show.
Update December 20, 2024, 11:55 a.m. ET: This article has been updated to include LG and Hyundai Mobis announcements ahead of CES 2025.