This year, over 4,000 exhibitors descended on Las Vegas, Nevada to showcase their wares at CES, and the Engadget team was out in full force. The week started with press conferences from the biggest companies at the show, which were often a flurry of AI buzzwords, vague promises and very little in the way of hard news.
More than one company even decided to forgo announcing things during their conferences to make way for more AI chatter, only to publish press releases later quietly admitting that, yes, actually, they did make some consumer technology. It's appropriate, I guess, that as we're beginning to feel the knock-on cost effects of the AI industry's insatiable appetite for compute resources — higher utility bills and device prices — companies would rather use their flashy conferences to reinforce AI's supposedly must-have attributes rather than actually inform the public about their new products.
We're by no means AI luddites at Engadget, but it's fair to say that our team is more excited by tangible products that enrich our lives than iterative improvements to large language models. So, away from all of the bombast of NVIDIA's marathon keynote and Lenovo's somehow simultaneously gaudy and dull Sphere show, it's been a pleasure to evaluate the crowd of weird new gadgets, appliances, toys and robots vying for our attention.
Over the course of several days of exhaustive discussion and impassioned pitching, our CES team has whittled down the hundreds of products we saw to pick our favorites. Starting with an initial shortlist of around 50 candidates across a diverse range of product categories, we eventu
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