It’s time for the biggest tech show of the year. CES 2025 officially kicks off next week, with most of the industry’s biggest names gathering in Las Vegas to announce new products and demonstrate some of the most exciting tech they have coming throughout the year.
CES is traditionally a show about TVs, laptops, and smart home tech. But it’s increasingly become a big show for cars, wearables and health tech, and a whole lot more. This year, expect one abbreviation to show up a lot across every single category: AI. The AI hype cycle is rolling straight into 2025, and there’s certain to be AI popping up on the next generation of TVs and cars, like it or not.
The show officially starts on Tuesday, January 7th, but you can expect announcements to start coming out on Sunday and Monday ahead of the show floor opening and a day of press conferences.
Here are the big beats we’re expecting to see at the show.
I’m expecting two prevailing trends for TVs at CES 2025: screens will keep getting bigger, and AI features are going to be everywhere — to the point of being inescapable. Consumers have been gravitating toward larger TVs over the last several years (we’re talking 75 inches and up), so get ready to see some giant OLED and Mini LED models from Samsung, LG, TCL, Hisense, and others.
And you can bet that practically every TV maker will be dialing the AI-powered tricks up to 11 this year. They’ve already done so with automatic picture and audio settings. But considering how popular ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and other AI assistants have become, it’s only a matter of time (maybe just days) before chatbots find their way to your next TV.
Expect the buzziest news to come from Samsung and LG. But I’m very curious to see what Panasonic has in store after a successful return to the US TV market last year.
CES 2025 will be the year of the smart home gadget. I’m anticipating an avalanche of new product announcements from companies like Aqara, Nanoleaf, Tapo, Reolink, SwitchBot, Shelly, Lutron, Lifx, Flic, and Cync, all of whom are exhibiting this year. I hope to see some real innovation — products that take the smart home to the next level — especially now that there’s the foundation of Matter, a unified connectivity standard they can leverage.
One area I expect to see a lot of new products with exciting features is smart locks. With the new Aliro standard launching next year, this space is ripe for disruption. Easier, more seamless ways to deal with locks and security is a universal need that will also help bring the benefits of home automation to more people.
We may see more screens than we really want to
Another trend I anticipate we’ll see on the show floor is new ways to control your smart home. Following the success of Amazon’s Echo Hub, I think we’ll see a slew of new touchscreen interfaces that connect to your smart home devices and offer a way for anyone in the home to control lights, locks, shades, and more without their phone or voice. We may see more screens than we really want to — Samsung has already teased its new “screens everywhere” initiative and is putting a touchscreen on all its appliances.
Another big theme will be robotics. Robot vacuums have been innovating at warp speed over the last few years, with many now capable of almost fully autonomous operation to sweep and mop your floors. With Ecovacs, Roborock, Dreame, Narwal, and more at the show, I anticipate we’ll see robot vacuums reach new heights.
Finally, home energy management will be an overarching theme across the smart home at CES. I’d expect most product announcements to have some focus on energy use and / or conservation, but more importantly, I think we’ll see announcements around new Home Energy Management Systems — platforms that will leverage AI to orchestrate the way your home uses energy to help you both conserve energy and save money. This is one of the most compelling reasons to add connectivity to your home, no matter how much fun color-changing lights are.
– Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
I think it’s safe to say that this year’s CES is looking like the sleepiest one yet from a transportation perspective. Most of the world’s major automakers are sitting this one out, and most of the transportation-themed announcements have, well, already been announced in some capacity.
Just look at the Afeela, Sony and Honda’s joint EV project: we’re expecting some updates about preorders and the customer experience, but this is the third show that we’re seeing the forthcoming vehicle make an appearance.
That doesn’t mean there won’t still be some exciting news. Honda is getting ready to share more details about its Honda Zero lineup, teasing two new vehicles that are sure to fill our quota for sleek, aerodynamic sedans with cool, cyberpunk-inspired lighting motifs.
BMW is the other major manufacturer with big CES plans this year. The German automaker plans on showing off the “Neue Klasse” platform that it’s been teasing for a couple of years, including its new panoramic iDrive display and a brand-new operating system.
To be sure, with the threat of tariffs and reduced incentives hovering over the EV market, it’s not surprising to see fewer plug-in vehicles on display at the show. But a number of commercial vehicle manufacturers, including John Deere and Oshkosh, are planning on making big announcements that should whet your appetite for battery-powered machines.
The Windows laptop space has seen a flurry of exciting changes over the past year, with Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm all releasing excellent new mobile CPUs across 2024. We’ll likely see a plethora of Intel Arrow Lake chips come to laptops and a range of new AMD offerings at the show, but the real story of CES is likely to be all about graphics: the entire PC space feels like it’s about to blow up with the anticipated launch of next-gen Nvidia GPUs.
