Every January since I started this blog Ive done some version of the same post: CES is happening, Im not there, and Im reading about it from my kitchen table with a second cup of coffee going cold next to the laptop. Eleven years running now. This years version is a little different though, because it looks like about half of tech isnt actually going to be there either.
In the last couple weeks Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, Waymo and T-Mobile all announced theyre pulling their in-person presence from CES 2022, citing the Omicron surge. Some are doing virtual booths instead, some are just not doing much of anything and letting their press releases speak for them. The show itself, organized by the Consumer Technology Association, is still going forward in Las Vegas starting the 5th, just with a noticeably thinner guest list of the companies that usually eat up all the oxygen in the room.
I get it. Case counts right now are absurd. Everyone I know has either had it in the last two weeks or is currently waiting on a rapid test result that may or may not exist because apparently you cant buy those anywhere right now either. My own attempt to find one at three different pharmacies over the weekend was a complete bust, all of them just had handwritten signs taped to the door. So a giant indoor trade show in a city built around packing people into windowless rooms is maybe not the move this particular January, and it sounds like a lot of corporate risk committees agree.
What I find funnier is watching my own inbox. Ive got a filter for "press release" that usually stays pretty quiet until the first week of January, then explodes with pitches for things like smart mirrors and a toothbrush that syncs to an app Im never going to open. That filter is still exploding this year, pullout or no pullout. Nothing stops a PR team with a CES deadline, not even a pandemic. If anything the emails read more desperate than usual, like theyre worried nobody will notice their product exists if half the big names arent physically standing next to them on the show floor.
Meanwhile, and this has basically nothing to do with CES, but its been sitting in the back of my head all week: Kazakhstan just shut off the internet for the entire country. Not "some sites are slow," not "the government is throttling Twitter," a full nationwide blackout, tracked in real time by the folks at NetBlocks, tied to protests over fuel prices that turned into something much bigger very fast. Its a wild thing to watch happen on a live map, and it makes the CES will-they-wont-they attendance drama feel pretty small by comparison. A government can just turn a whole country off. Worth sitting with for a second before we all go back to arguing about which laptop hinge is the most innovative hinge of 2022.
Anyway. Ill still read through the CES coverage this week the same way I always do, mostly through liveblogs written by people who are actually standing on the floor, because Im not going to CES this year either, Omicron or not. I never do. Ive been writing about this show from a distance since roughly 2012 and I dont think Ive ever once held a badge for it. What I will say is that the last couple Vegas CES shows Ive followed already felt kind of hollow even before any of this, all keynote, no surprise, everything embargoed and pre-briefed down to the minute. Maybe a leaner show this year, even one thats leaner by accident, ends up being more interesting than a full one. I doubt it. But maybe.
Talk to you after the badges come off and we find out what half these announcements were even about.