What's coming for gadgets in 2020 and at CES This editorial appears on our full CES preview, which also has a breakdown of a few big categories in consumer tech, including phones, rideables, PCs, headphones, gaming, and more. It's going up on The Verge today, look for it! In 2020, this is what to expect in the world of consumer tech: the best stuff is going to get more powerful and more premium. At The Verge, we actually don't like calling stuff "premium" because it's such an overused word. But this year, it's going to get used even more and, well, it fits. It tells you that the best stuff is going to get better and — more importantly — more expensive. The changes are also premium because a lot of the improvements at the high end are going to be things that most people won't need: 5G phones are going to be everywhere — maybe even coming from Apple — but the networks for them are still nascent. TVs are going to get new features like high refresh rates that will matter to gamers, but perhaps no one else. And the latest PC chips could be the biggest leap for laptops we've seen in years, but we won't know until they start getting released at scale. A lot of gadgets will fold in half, too — which is going to be neat, but we don't know if it will be necessary. Other innovations will be a little more practical. Those scooters you see everywhere? They're not going away, but they should be getting a little more robust and a little less disposable. And as the year winds on, we'll see the console wars heat up again as Sony and Microsoft get their new consoles ready for battle. There's one more big trend to talk about that's more software than hardware: streaming TV. The streaming wars are in full tilt and we'll get even more services launching in 2020. How many will most people be willing to subscribe to and how much will all these competitors spend on making new shows? Answers, respectively: more than they want to and way more than you'd expect. All of these trends are set to kick off at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The Verge will be there, with coverage starting in earnest on Sunday, January 5th. CES won't have every major gadget that will matter this year, but it is a place to see where the electronics industry is going. Walk into any big box store and you'll see TVs for a couple hundred dollars with features that were multithousand-dollar curiosities just a few years ago. Phones with in-screen fingerprint sensors debuted at CES only to become ubiquitous a couple years later. Since the biggest tech companies usually save their best products for their own announcements, you can also expect CES to be a place where smaller players have a better shot at their time in the spotlight. Trickle-down economics isn't a viable economic theory anymore, but it still applies to gadgets. The stuff at the top eventually gets commoditized, with prices coming down and fancy features hitting the mainstream. In 2020, that'll keep happening — and the premium gadgets will mostly be about making existing categories better instead of creating new ones. | 
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