I'm about a week behind on CES coverage, which is normal for me, because I refuse to read any of it live. Every January the same thing happens: a few thousand press releases get dumped on the internet over four days in Vegas, and I sit here in my actual house avoiding all of it until the dust settles and somebody tells me what was real and what was a concept that will never ship. This year the two things that actually stuck with me weren't the TVs.
Samsung spent a chunk of its keynote renaming its own TV lineup. UHD is apparently done, we're on SUHD now, the S standing for nothing I can find a straight answer on, quantum dots involved somehow. I've had exactly one conversation in my life about quantum dots and it was with a guy at a hardware store who could not tell me what they do either. I don't doubt the picture looks nice. I doubt anyone needed a new acronym eight months after we all finally learned the old one.
What I actually want to talk about is the motorized skates.
Acton had a thing at CES called the Rocketskates, the R8 specifically, which are exactly what they sound like: strap-on wheels with a motor in them that you steer by leaning, no laces, no push-off, you just kind of lean forward and go. They're pitching it as the last-mile commute solution, the thing you wear from the train station to your desk. Preorders were sitting around five hundred dollars with the eventual retail price higher than that. I watched maybe four different demo videos of people in a Vegas convention hall gliding around on these things at what looked like a genuinely alarming speed for something with no brakes I could identify, and I have never wanted an object less while also being fully unable to stop thinking about it. This is the exact feeling CES is built to produce in a person, I think. Not "I need this" so much as "I cannot get this out of my head."
The other one is a toothbrush. Kolibree showed off what they're calling the first connected electric toothbrush, which pairs over Bluetooth and tracks your brushing and turns it into a game for kids so they'll actually do it for two minutes instead of the usual eleven seconds. On paper this is fine, even smart, and I say that as someone who spent about six years brushing his teeth wrong before a dentist finally sat me down and showed me the actual motion with a model jaw like I was in third grade again. Maybe an app that yells at you gently is worth something. But somewhere in the last two years we crossed a line where "connect it to an app" became the default pitch for every object in a house, and I don't think we ever had the conversation about whether that's good, we just started doing it. A toothbrush does not need a companion app. A toothbrush needs bristles and a person who isn't lazy.
None of this is really a complaint about the toothbrush specifically, or the skates, it's more that I read through a stack of CES writeups and the takeaway both times was some version of "here's a normal object with a chip in it now," and that's going to keep being the takeaway every January for the foreseeable future, and at some point I'm going to have a Bluetooth-enabled something in every room of my apartment whether I asked for it or not. I already own a thermostat that talks to my phone and I'll be honest, I check it maybe once a month, usually to confirm it's doing exactly what the dial on the wall would have done for free.
Anyway. If anyone reading this actually buys the Rocketskates, email me, I want to see it happen to a real person and not a promotional video with a stunt guy in it. I'm not buying a pair myself, my downstairs neighbor already complains about my footsteps and I do not need to introduce a motor to the equation. The toothbrush I might actually look into once it's real and not just a booth demo, mostly out of guilt about my last dentist visit.
Back to the regular stuff soon. I've got a post half-written about switching my backups over to something that isn't a USB drive I keep losing, which is a problem entirely of my own making and not remotely CES's fault.