What to expect at CES 2024

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What to expect at CES 2024

No single event of the year delivers more tech news than CES. The annual trade show is the starting point for each year in tech, giving companies a chance to announce their next wave of products or tease the ambitious, far-out, and often strange new projects they’ve been working on behind the scenes.

This year’s show kicks off from Las Vegas on Tuesday, January 9th and runs through Friday, January 12th, but you should expect news to start coming out as soon as, really, right now. Companies have been trickling out announcements over the past week, and many will try to preempt the conference with announcements in the days before the show floor opens up.

There’s also an entire day of keynote presentations ahead of the show’s official start. On Monday, expect news from LG, Samsung, Nvidia, Sony, and a whole lot more, as a lineup of companies from the tech and auto worlds run back-to-back presentations.

As always, The Verge will be covering the show inside and out. Here are some of the big stories we expect to see this year.

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CES is first and foremost a show about new TVs. But it seems like we’re in for a relatively quiet, iterative year when it comes to new TV hardware. Last year, we saw meaningful leaps in brightness for OLED TVs, which made them suitable for brighter rooms and more viewing environments. And Mini LED became the status quo for mid- to high-end LCD TVs — at relatively affordable prices, to boot. 

But LG has already announced its 2024 lineup, and there aren’t any huge panel upgrades in store this year. Instead, the buzzy “new” thing from LG, Roku, and presumably other brands is centered around AI processing. We’ve seen TV makers use AI and machine learning to optimize picture and sound for a few years now, but they’re really leaning into it at CES 2024. Perhaps that’s no surprise given the rise of LLMs like ChatGPT, Bard, and others. With home theater, AI is being used to tweak settings that many consumers never bother adjusting themselves and give content greater depth and clarity. Picture purists will no doubt disable many of these AI tricks, but the trend is undeniable. 

The wild card, as ever, is Samsung. Will the leading TV manufacturer play it safe like many competitors, or does the company have something more groundbreaking in its back pocket? We’ll find out in Las Vegas in a matter of days. — Chris Welch

While CES often masquerades as a car show, this year is likely to be different. Ford, General Motors, Stellantis, and a bunch of other notable names will be absent from the event. For that, you can thank the United Auto Workers strike over the summer, which led the Big Three to cancel their CES plans this year. 

But there will still be plenty of auto-focused announcements, from a new “global EV series” from Honda, to a flurry of in-car technology. And, of course, all of this will likely come with a sprinkling of our favorite tech buzzwords, including AI, LLMs, and machine learning. So keep your eyes peeled for that. 

In addition to Honda, major car companies like Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, and BMW will have news to share during CES. And Big Tech players like Intel and Amazon will be burnishing their status as emerging auto suppliers with some sneak peaks at new products coming in the future. So while there’s going to be less auto news to chew on than in years past, CES is still likely to dish up a few surprises for all the gearheads and mobility nerds in attendance. — Andrew J. Hawkins

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Intel just announced a whole new lineup of chips in the Meteor Lake family, and that means you can expect to see a whole lot of laptops at CES sporting the updated silicon. But a processor spec bump generally isn’t enough to catch the eye at the largest consumer electronics show in the world. 

CES is where laptop makers like to show off some of their flashiest new designs and funky little experiments they’ve been tinkering with. That means we should see at least one or two quirky devices that will have us pondering the evolution of the laptop’s design.

I’d also bet we’re going to see some bigger laptops. An adage at The Verge is people love big screens, and that love isn’t limited to phones and TVs. They want them in their laptops, too. With Apple recently embracing larger 14- and 16-inch displays, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of its competitors start following suit, moving us slowly away from the standard 13- and 15-inch laptop sizes to something a little roomier. — Alex Cranz

Expect to see a lot of smart home innovations based around two words: artificial intelligence. Samsung is setting the tone with its press conference titled “AI for All: Connectivity in the Age of AI,” (see how they got AI in there twice?!). The electronics giant has already announced smart cooktops, vacuums, and fridges with AI baked in, and I expect there’s more to come. LG will show off an AI-powered home robot with the catchy name “Smart Home AI Agent” that it claims will “understand context and intentions as well as actively communicate with users.”