So it's day three of CES and I am officially running on hotel coffee and spite. My feet hurt, the Vegas convention center carpet has some kind of personal vendetta against my ankles, and I've said the word "ultrabook" out loud so many times today it's stopped sounding like a real word. It's just noise now. Ul-tra-book. Try it, it falls apart after a few repetitions.
Quick recap for anyone who hasn't been following: Intel decided this is The Year Of The Ultrabook, and every laptop maker on the show floor got the memo. Thin, light, expensive, aggressively similar to a MacBook Air. I walked the Lenovo booth, the Acer booth, the Asus booth, and honestly by the third one I couldn't have told you which laptop belonged to which company if you'd quizzed me five minutes later. They all had the same tapered aluminum-ish wedge shape, the same "instant on" pitch, the same guy in a polo shirt telling me about SSD caching like it's a revelation. It's a fine idea for a laptop! I just don't need eleven versions of it announced in the same 48 hours.
Microsoft did their keynote last night and, well, it happened. I'm not going to pretend I was riveted. There's already talk going around the press area that this might be Microsoft's last CES keynote, that they're stepping back from doing this whole song and dance every January going forward, and honestly? I get it. The keynote didn't feel like it needed the CES stage anymore. It felt like a company going through motions everyone showed up expecting. If that's really the last one, it's a weirdly quiet way to end a run they've had here for years.
Here's my actual complaint though, the one I keep coming back to walking around this place: I don't think most of this stuff ships. Not in the form I'm looking at right now, anyway. CES has always been part trade show and part fantasy convention, but this year it feels especially loose with reality. I saw at least three "smart TV" platforms with app stores that looked identical to each other and none of which I'd bet money on still existing by next January. I saw a connected fridge. I saw a fitness gadget that wanted to sync to a cloud service that, as far as I can tell, is two guys and a server rack somewhere. Some of this is vaporware in the nicest possible sense, real prototypes, real intentions, and some of it is just booth dressing to get a blogger like me to stop and take a picture. I can't always tell which is which, and neither, I suspect, can the person demoing it to me.
Compare that to the actual stuff people are using right now. The iPhone 4S has been out since October and Siri's still the thing everyone brings up unprompted when they find out what I write about, usually to complain about it not understanding them. The Kindle Fire's been flying off shelves at $199 since mid-November and Amazon clearly built a real thing there, not a concept. Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich are out in the world too. None of that happened at a trade show. It happened at retail, where money changes hands and returns get processed and reviews get written by people who actually own the object.
That's the filter I'm running everything through today. Not "is this cool", most of it is, in a shiny-object kind of way, but "will I be able to buy this, for a real price, before the end of the year." By that measure I'd guess maybe a third of what I've seen the last three days actually makes it out. The ultrabooks will ship, obviously, Intel's throwing too much marketing money at that for it not to happen. Most of the weirder connected-home stuff, the app-store-on-your-refrigerator stuff? I'd put money against it.
Also, small tangent, but whoever designed the press line for badge pickup on day one should have to walk it themselves every morning for a week. Forty minutes standing in a hallway that smelled like carpet glue is not how I wanted to start this trip.
One more day of this tomorrow and then I'm very much looking forward to a flight home, a bed that isn't a hotel bed, and not hearing the word "ultrabook" for at least a little while.