Coming back to CES after a decade-long break was a trip

Twelve years ago, I could have told you exactly what happened at my first CES and what happened at my third. Each was a chapter with a beginning, middle and end; the lines between them clearly drawn. But now, 15 years since I attended my first CES, it’s a lot fuzzier. I know I missed my flight home on that first show. I know I’ve seen a lot of cameras before, and then progressively fewer cameras over the years. I know there were team dinners and advance meetings, but I couldn’t say what happened when.

What i to do know about my first CESes is that I had – and I can’t stress enough – no idea what he was doing. The same happened for CES two, three and four, to varying degrees. I think I had a Pentax DSLR borrowed from a colleague. I had a work BlackBerry and, I’m sure, insisted on wearing nice clothes and uncomfortable shoes to evening events. There was no Uber in the beginning, and you could spend an hour waiting in a taxi line at the airport. We stayed at the MGM Grand, which housed live lions at the time.

I broke an 11 year streak no going to CES this year, which gave me a rare opportunity. It’s not often in life that we get to step back and look at something that has become routine with fresh eyes. But that’s more or less my mission at CES 2025. There’s not much for me here on the smartphone beat, so my job is just to walk the show floor, find cool stuff, and put it in the site. I took this mandate extremely seriously by planning very few, busy meetings The Virgin CMS on my phone’s browser, and wearing sensible shoes for the miles of walking I’ll be embarking on.

The journey begins on the first day in the West Hall. There’s a Dunkin’ with a fast-moving line, plenty of seating, and electrical outlets built into the booths. No trace with my memories of the deterioration of seats so small and crowded that I often ate lunch sitting on the floor. Later, I realized that’s why this whole hall was not there last time I was at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). I tell myself that I’m going to do a quick tour around the place and then go into the Central Hall to see the big booths, but then I see them: Big tractors.

They are huge, and only some of them are tractors. The first one I’ve seen is an autonomous, articulated dump truck, a John Deere representative informs me. I don’t really have a reason to be there, but it’s cool as hell. Forty minutes later, I have pictures of myself in front of all the tractors, a garbage truck, and an electric fire truck. I find myself back where I started an hour later and heading towards the Central Hall in search of robots.

CES always has one thing. I remember the days of sitting through 3D TV demos. This year, they are robots: both the hardware type and those integrated in the software. Robots pick up socks, going up stairsoffers companies, or just be nice guys. And of course, robots in the form of AI. Everything has AI in it, from televisions to glasses, whether there is a business or not.

Robots They’re not new to CES, of courseBut this culture seems capable of actually doing things for us, although reliability varies. I watched as an adorable little robot dived off a table unexpectedly as it rushed toward my colleague. “It’s durable,” said the robot’s handler as he picked it up and put it back on its perch. I don’t think we have anything to fear from the current crop of robots, you know, sir.

Getting to Las Vegas during the show — the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) says about 140,000 people will attend this year — remains a major hurdle. A decade of transportation innovation has done nothing to improve the situation. I still find myself walking between places to avoid gridlock in the streets and rideshare pick-up areas.

At one point, I got into a Tesla with two other attendants and went down the Vegas Loop. It feels like a short, slightly futuristic Uber ride and saves me a long walk between the West and Central concourses. Cool, I think? But there’s still no good way to get from the LVCC to the Venetian, and I’m stuck on a bus that moves for 15 minutes through half a dozen cycles of traffic lights waiting to make the last left turn at the drop -off of exposure.

Outside the convention center, I took in the ways Vegas has changed — and hasn’t — in the last decade. Tourists still line the edge of the gondola ride through the Venetian as the gondolier’s voice rings out in a slightly mournful tone, reverberating from a Banana Republic storefront. There are always men standing along the road handing out cards for silly fun, flapping the pieces of paper to get your attention.

A woman standing at the front desk outside a restaurant exclaims, “Allison! Is that you?” as I pulled out on my way to an appointment. I’ve fallen for that tactic once or twice in previous years, but I’m old enough now to remember that she just read the name on my badge and I didn’t. not my step. In Vegas, your attention is a currency that is second only to the actual currency.

There’s a new fixture on the strip that’s impossible to ignore: the Sphere. One of my meetings in a hotel suite overlooking the Sphere stops so I can watch an animation of what looks like an alien breaking the glass and coming out of it. The biggest item on my agenda for day two of the show is Delta’s keynote at the Sphere (it’s sphere, no him Sphere, Delta’s media communications remind us). This is not the first time it has been used as a CES location, but it is the first major presentation in the space.

And the keynote is quite the show. Delta uses the Sphere’s huge internal screen and other experimental effects in every way you can imagine. A plane approaches the audience, and as it taxis, a wind blows as if from jet engines. The simulated plane lands later and our seats rumble to mimic the impact of landing on the runway. At one point, a sweet syrupy smell is pumped into the space, revealed to be hazelnut coffee, as delivered by an Uber Eats driver on a moped. Tom Brady made an appearance that I didn’t understand, but overall, he promised a show and delivered.

Towards the end of the presentation, the lights dim and the screen shows an image of the Earth as a giant glass ball, floating, rotating in front of the stained glass windows. The light seems to catch and reflect in the three-dimensional object, and even though I to know Looking at an illusion on a flat screen, my brain is convinced that there is a giant orb, floating in front of me. Even looking back at my recorded videos, I can’t believe it isn’t there. It took 15 years, but I think I finally got a great 3D demo at CES.

What struck me most about this CES was the same show-ness of everything. I know it’s a show. We all call it a show. We say things like “You have a great show!” to the other when we are here. After years of attendance, the CES can feel like a mission, a series of things to do, as long as the Las Vegas Strip that you cross one by one, step by step. But above all, it’s a show. There are no acrobatics or stunts, but it is still supposed to make us feel something.

Like any good show on the Strip, there is a bit of sleight of hand involved. Someone behind the scenes controlling the “autonomous” robot. The concept car that never ships. The giant glass ball that is just a series of pixels arranged precisely on a curved screen. Like any other show, there is a beginning, a middle and an end – you either remember it or you don’t.

The details of this year’s CES will probably fade with time like all others, but I will remember the feeling of it for much longer. And even for someone who’s seen plenty of CES come and go, it turns out you can still feel a little sense of wonder after all. But I’m not holding my breath about any of those concept car deliveries.

Photo by Allison Johnson/The Verge