Tech Trends from CES
Beyond the products and into the future of the PC platform itself
THIS MONTH, I was lucky enough to head out to Las Vegas for this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. You can read my full report on page 32, where I pick out the best products. As I mentioned in my editor’s intro, there were many more great products than I could cover in the 35 I was able to pick for inclusion in the ten-page feature.
But here, I want to talk about the general trends I spotted at the show and why I think this year was one of the best for PC fans. There was a mountain of RTX 4000-series powered laptops on show from the likes of Lenovo, Acer, and particularly, Asus. While, at the time of writing, prices are being kept under wraps (although $3,000-$4,000 seems likely for top-end 4090 models), the slimness of some of these models, in particular, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, means they combine portability, and power in a way we’ve not seen before. And seeing one RTX 4090 machine power a triplescreen racing rig made me want to ditch my desktop, cost be damned.
But even bigger than laptops at CES were displays. OLED panels, pretty much limited to my beloved Alienware AW3423DW today, are set to be in everything in 2023, from laptops to gaming displays and professional monitors like the Asus ProArt Display OLED. Samsung is also showing it will never stop when it comes to making the biggest and widest screens possible in its Odyssey range, while Alienware was pushing refresh rates to 500Hz on its eSports-focused AW2524H monitor.
There’s one area I’d like to see the PC industry go faster though—recycling and upgradability. The rest of the show was awash with ‘green’ products, such as Samsung’s microplastic-filtering washing machine and the Lightyear 2 solar-powered car. Dell’s modular Concept Luna showed us a future where laptops can be taken apart and upgraded with a simple SIM card removal tool, but such a product being readily available still feels some way off.