CES kicked off today, except it didn't, not really. There's no show floor this year, no Vegas, no walking six miles between the Sands and the LVCC and losing your voice yelling over the crowd noise at some rando startup's speaker demo. It's all just... browser tabs. A bunch of press conferences streamed one after another starting at like 6am my time because everything's calibrated to Pacific.
This is the first time in CES's history it's gone fully digital, and I'll admit I had low expectations going in. Half right, half wrong, which feels about normal for this whole format of "conference" we're all doing now.
The thing that actually stuck with me from today wasn't a keynote number or a spec sheet. It was a fifteen-second teaser clip LG put out for something they're calling the LG Rollable. A phone where the screen physically unrolls to get bigger, like a window shade, going from a normal-size display to something more like a small tablet. No price, no release date, barely even confirmation it's a real shipping product and not a tech demo dressed up as one. Just a moody video and a name.
I want to be excited about this and I sort of am, but I've also watched enough of these teaser-to-nothing cycles at this point to have a specific, unhelpful prediction: this thing either ships in some tiny quantity at an absurd price nobody I know will ever touch, or it quietly gets shelved a year from now with zero explanation. LG's phone division has been bleeding money for something like twenty straight quarters at this point (I did not fact check that number, it's a vibe number, but it's in that neighborhood), and a moonshot rollable screen is exactly the kind of thing a struggling division does right before it stops existing. I hope I'm wrong. I like weird hardware. I just don't trust the follow-through.
GM's press conference was the other one worth mentioning, mostly because they spent a chunk of it unveiling a new logo — a sort of minimalist blue-and-white wordmark, meant to signal the shift toward electric vehicles — right alongside BrightDrop, which is their new electric delivery van and package-cart business aimed squarely at FedEx and UPS style logistics fleets. Then, almost as a coda, they showed a concept render of a single-passenger flying vehicle for Cadillac, complete with rotors, that is very obviously not a product anyone will own in this decade. Watching a car company do a logo reveal and a flying car concept in the same hour, streamed into my living room while I'm still in yesterday's sweatpants, is a genuinely strange way to consume "the auto industry's big CES moment." There was no crowd reaction to read, no applause, nothing. Just a video ending and a chat window scrolling too fast to read.
Samsung's presser had some of their usual home robot stuff, a "Bot Care" companion robot they've now shown at multiple CES events without it ever really becoming a thing you can buy, plus the standard wall of new TV branding. I stopped taking TV panel technology seriously as CES content a few years back, no offense to anyone who cares, it's just not where my attention goes anymore.
What I keep coming back to is how much of the actual experience of CES was never the products, it was the walking around, the overheard conversations, the guy demoing a weird gadget at a card table who clearly built it in his garage and is thrilled someone stopped to look. None of that exists in a livestream. You get the press release version of the show with all the texture sanded off. I don't think that's a fair trade even if I understand exactly why it had to happen this year.
I'll probably keep half-watching the streams through the rest of the week since there's a few more days of this. If the rollable phone actually ships with a real price tag before next January, I will eat something embarrassing on this blog. Low bar, I know, but it's the kind of prediction I'm willing to stand behind.