CES wrapped up today and I've had about four hours of sleep this week, so bear with me if this is a little scattered. I didn't go, I never go, I just watch it happen from my couch through a haze of liveblogs and shaky YouTube keynote streams that buffer every ninety seconds, but even from here you could tell this was a weird one. Not bad, necessarily. Just weird.
The overall verdict, if you want it up front: solid but forgettable. Nothing this year made me want to sell a kidney the way the first time I saw an iPad did back in 2010. It was mostly refinement, thinner, lighter, more pixels, dressed up as revolution. Which, fine, that's most years of CES if I'm honest.
The buzzword nobody could escape
If you paid any attention at all this week you already know the word. Ultrabook. Ultrabook. Ultrabook. Intel has apparently decided this is the hill they're dying on, and they brought a marketing budget to match, every other booth had some thin-and-light laptop with an Intel sticker on it, and every rep said "Ultrabook" in that specific tone people use when they've been told to say a word forty times a day. Asus had a new Zenbook variant out. Lenovo, Acer, Dell, all in the game. They're chasing the MacBook Air, obviously, no one's pretending otherwise, and some of them get close on thinness. Whether they get close on the thing that actually makes the Air good, the trackpad, the way OS X handles sleep and wake, just the overall not-annoying-ness of the machine, is a different question, and I don't think swapping in a spinning disk's worth of SSD and calling it a day answers it.
Will they actually catch on? I'll go out on a limb: yes, but not this year, and not at these prices. A lot of these are launching north of $999, and that's a tough sell against an Air that starts cheaper and already has three years of not sucking behind it. Give it twelve, eighteen months for the price to come down and the software polish to catch up and I think "ultrabook" quietly becomes just "how laptops are" rather than a category anyone bothers naming. But as of this week it's mostly Intel willing something into existence through repetition.
Biggest letdown: Microsoft's keynote
Microsoft did their big CES keynote again, like they have for years, and it just felt tired. Nothing wrong with it exactly, Ballmer did his usual Ballmer thing, but there wasn't a single moment where I sat up. Reportedly this is actually the last time Microsoft's doing a CES keynote at all going forward, which honestly tracks, if this is the send-off, it wasn't much of one. Kind of a shrug of an ending for something that used to be the marquee event of the whole show.
Biggest surprise: cars, of all things
Didn't expect to say this, but the thing that actually made me pause was Audi showing off self-parking, semi-autonomous car tech on the show floor. A car show floor moment stealing attention at an electronics show is a little funny to me, but there it is, CES has quietly turned into half a car show over the last couple years and I don't think enough people are talking about that shift. Everyone's busy arguing about laptop thickness while there's a car in the room quietly parking itself.
(Also, yes, there were connected fridges again. There are always connected fridges. I don't know who is asking for a fridge with a screen on it and I don't think I ever will. My fridge's job is to be cold and quiet and I resent the implication that it also needs an app.)
Nothing on the phone side really moved me this week either, feels like everyone's still catching their breath after the iPhone 4S and the Galaxy Nexus rollout back in the fall, and the next real fight in that space is probably a few months out. Tablets were everywhere too, mostly Android ICS stuff nobody will remember by spring.
Anyway. Long week, tired eyes, and I've got a stack of half-written drafts about SOPA I should probably actually finish before that hearing stuff gets buried under CES noise entirely.