Twelve years ago, I could have told you what happened at my first CES and what happened at my third. Each was a chapter with a beginning, middle, and end; The lines between them are clearly drawn. But now, 15 years since I attended my first CES, it's much more vague. I know I missed my flight home that first show. I know I saw a lot of cameras at first, and then gradually less and less over the years. I know there were team dinners and kick-off meetings, but I can't tell you what happened when.
what i to do Learn about my first CES – and I can't stress this enough – I had no idea what I was doing. The same applied, to varying degrees, for CES two, three and four. I think a co-worker of mine lent me a Pentax DSLR. I had a BlackBerry issued for work and I'm pretty sure I insisted on wearing nice clothes and impractical shoes to evening events. There was no Uber in the beginning, and you could spend an hour waiting in the cab line at the airport. We stayed at the MGM Grand, which housed live lions at the time.
I broke the streak of 11 years No Going to CES this year gave me a rare opportunity. It's not often in life that we can step back and look at something that has become routine, with fresh eyes. But that's more or less been my job at CES 2025. There's not a lot going on for me here at Smartphone Beat, so my job is just to walk around the show floor, find cool stuff and put it on the site. I have taken this remit extremely seriously by scheduling very few meetings, loading The Verge's CMS on my phone's browser, and will wear sensible shoes to walk the miles.
The tour starts at West Hall on the first day. There's a Dunkin' that has a fast line, lots of seats, and electrical outlets built into the booths. None of this matches my memories of the seating area being poor, so small and crowded that I often had lunch sitting on the floor. Later, I realized that this is because This entire hall was never there Last time I was at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). I tell myself I'll take a spin around the place and then head to the central hall to look at the big booths, but then I see them: big tractor,
They are huge, and only a few of them are tractors. A representative from John Deere told me that the first thing I saw was an autonomous, articulated dump truck. I have no real reason to be here, but it's cool as hell. Forty minutes later, I have pictures of me in front of all the tractors, a garbage truck, and an electric fire truck. I arrive back where I started an hour later and head to the central hall in search of the robot.
There's always a thing happening at CES. I remember the days of watching 3D TV demos. This year, these are robots: both the hardware kind and those embedded in software. robots pick up socks, walking up stairsoffering companionship, or just be a sweet little boyAnd yes, robots in the form of AI. There's AI in everything from TVs to glasses, whether it has any business or not.
robots Of course, not new to CESBut this crop really seems to be able to work for us, although reliability varies. I watched a small, adorable robot unexpectedly dive from a table as it headed toward my coworker. “It's durable,” said the robot's handler as he picked it up and put it back in place. I don't think we have any need to fear the current generation of robots, you know, Overlord-wise.
Getting around to Las Vegas during the show — the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) says about 140,000 people are attending this year — remains a major hurdle. A decade of transportation innovation has done nothing to improve the situation. I still find myself moving between venues to avoid gridlock on the roads and in rideshare pickup zones.
At one point, I climb into a Tesla with two other attendees and take off in the Vegas Loop. It feels like a short, slightly futuristic Uber ride and saves me the long distance between West and Central Hall. Great, I guess? But there's still no good way to get from the LVCC to Venice, and I'm sitting on a bus that moves for 15 minutes through half a dozen traffic light cycles and waiting for one last left turn at the Expo drop-off. Still working.
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Photo by Alison Johnson/The Verge
Outside the convention center, I take in the ways Vegas has – and hasn't – changed over the past decade. Tourists still line the banks of the Gondola route through Venice as the gondolier's voice, in a slightly mournful tone, echoes from the Banana Republic storefront. There are still people standing on street corners handing out cards for fun, tapping out pieces of paper to get your attention.
A woman standing at the front desk outside a restaurant yells, “Allison! Is that you?” as I hurry to go to an appointment. I've fallen into that tactic once or twice over the years, but now I know enough to remember that she just Read the name on my badge and I don't break my move. In Vegas, your focus is on a currency that is second only to the actual currency.
There's a new fixture on the strip that's impossible to ignore: the sphere. One of my meetings in a hotel suite overlooking the sphere pauses so we can watch an animation that looks like an alien breaking the glass and climbing out of it. The biggest item on my agenda for day two of the show is Delta's keynote at the Sphere (it's Circle, No Sphere, Delta's media communication reminds us). This is not the first time it has been used as a CES venue, but it is the first major presentation in this area.
And the keynote is quite a show. Uses the Delta Sphere's huge interior screen and other experiential effects in all the ways you'd imagine. A plane moves toward the audience, and as it turns to taxi, a wind blows as if coming from a jet engine. The fake plane later lands and our seats rumble to mimic the effect of touching down on the runway. At one point, a syrupy-sweet smell is pumped into the space, which turns out to be hazelnut coffee, as delivered by an Uber Eats driver on a moped. Tom Brady gave a performance that I didn't understand, but overall, it promised and delivered a great performance.
At the end of the presentation, the lights dim and an image of the Earth appears on the screen as a giant, floating glass ball, rotating in front of the colored glass. It seems that light catches and reflects off a three-dimensional object, and even though I Know I'm seeing an illusion on a flat screen, my brain convinced that there is a giant, floating sphere in front of me. Even seeing it in my recorded video, I can't believe it's not there. It took 15 years, but I think I finally got a great 3D demo at CES.
The thing that impressed me most about this CES was this show-The gist of it all. I know it's a show. We all call it a show. We say things like, “What a great show!” To each other when we're here. After attending for years, CES can feel like an assignment, a series of tasks as long as the Las Vegas Strip that you overcome one by one, step by step. But most of all, it's a show. There are no acrobatics or stunts involved, but it still makes us feel something.
It took 15 years, but I think I finally got a great 3D demo at CES
Like a good show on the Strip, there's some sleight of hand involved. Someone behind the scenes is controlling the “autonomous” robot. The concept car that never ships. A giant glass ball that is simply a series of precisely arranged pixels on a curved screen. Like any other show, it too has a beginning, middle and end – whether we remember them or not.
The details of this year's CES will probably fade with time, like all the rest, but I'll remember the feeling of it for a long time. And even for someone who has seen a lot of CES come and go, it turns out you can still feel a slight sense of wonder. But I'm not holding my breath about any of those concept cars shipping.
Photography by Alison Johnson/The Verge