Okay so I've had one eye on the CES live blogs since about 9am and my browser has approximately eleven tabs open right now, so let's talk about day one before I lose track of what happened when.
The word of the show, hands down, no contest, is "Ultrabook." I don't think I've seen a single press release, booth banner, or product photo today that didn't have it stamped somewhere. Intel's been pushing this term since Computex last year, but on the CES floor it's gone from "a category Intel wants to exist" to "the thing literally every PC maker built their entire press conference around." Lenovo, Asus, Acer, Toshiba, Dell, all of them had thin-and-light laptops on stage today, most under 21mm thick, most bragging about sub-3-pound weights and multi-hour battery claims. It's very obviously the industry's answer to the MacBook Air, except now there's a marketing budget behind it (Intel's reportedly put something like $300 million into promoting the category), so instead of one company quietly making a nice thin laptop, you get a dozen companies all racing to hit the same $999 price point Intel apparently wants as the entry line.
Some of these look genuinely nice. The Asus Zenbook, which I only knew from spec sheets before today, looks like it was actually designed by someone with taste, which I say as someone who has opinions about hinge design that are probably too strong for a Tuesday. A few of the Lenovo ones looked more like "we photocopied an Air and changed the logo," which, fine, I get it, but it's a little funny watching six companies converge on the exact same wedge shape within about a year of each other.
My one gripe, and I'll probably say this again before the week's out: a lot of these things are light on ports. One or two USB, no optical drive obviously, sometimes no Ethernet at all. I understand why, thinness is the whole pitch, but I still carry a USB stick and an SD card around more than I'd like to admit, and "just buy a dongle" is not a sentence that should exist in 2012.
The other big story of the morning was Microsoft's keynote, which Ballmer gave, and which, according to Microsoft themselves, is the last one they're doing. They announced a while back that this would be it for CES keynotes going forward, which makes today feel a little bit like the end of an era, even though I can't say I'll miss the format much. It was a pretty standard "here's Xbox and Kinect and Windows Phone" tour, nothing that felt like news exactly, more like a victory lap dressed up as a keynote. Kind of a strange note to go out on, honestly. I half expected more fanfare given it's supposedly the swan song.
Beyond the Ultrabook stampede, the floor's got the usual CES chaos, a wall of Android tablets nobody will remember by March, TVs getting thinner and somehow also bigger at the same time, and enough "smart" appliances to make you wonder if anyone asked for a fridge with a screen on it. I haven't seen anything today that made my jaw drop the way, say, the first time I saw a Kindle Fire in person did back in November. It's more of an incremental show so far, lots of "thinner, lighter, a little better" rather than anything that feels new. Which, fair, that's kind of what year two or three of a hardware trend looks like.
Still two more days of this. I'm curious whether Ultrabook fatigue sets in by Thursday or whether every single laptop announcement between now and Friday just blurs into the same 13-inch aluminum wedge. Early money's on the latter.