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CES 2020 is here and here's how to set your expectations Nick Statt ran though all the biggest announcements from last year's CES and rounded them up: The best tech of CES 2019: what happened next? CES has a well-earned reputation for vaporware, and there are definitely things on this list that never got released. But there are also a bunch of things that were, including some I didn't really think would pan out. It is easy to point out all the useless crap here and even easier to point out all the clearly-doomed-to-fail products. My job as a journalist who writes about gadgets is to try to guess what things are worth attention and what things aren't. One difference between me and those who are disillusioned with giant consumer tech conferences like CES is our definition of what's attention-worthy is different. Let's make this more concrete. Below is a TV announcement from LG. LG is a company that has relative success in TVs and appliances and has lost the thread on phones. And since phones are so important, LG's relative irrelevance in that category makes it easy to dismiss as a company. But LG also makes all sort of components — especially screens — that appear in other, more successful products. Anyway, here's the news: └ LG unveils eight 'Real 8K' OLED and LCD TVs ahead of CES The announcement marks a continuation of LG's proxy war with Samsung over what exactly constitutes an 8K TV. While both companies agree that 8K is a resolution of 7680 horizontal pixels by 4320 vertical pixels, the two companies have different ideas about how these should be measured. LG uses the Consumer Technology Association's definition, which relies on a measurement called "Contrast Modulation" to define its pixels. Meanwhile, Samsung uses the 8K Association's definition (an organization which LG is not a member of), which doesn't list any such requirements Objectively, this is one thousand percent ridiculous. I bet there are more people arguing over how to count pixels for 8K TVs than there are people making actual 8K content to show on those TVs. This is literally an argument over counting, but the result of the argument will have repercussions for people trying to make 8K content in the future. So yes, CES is awful. Ivanka Trump is being interviewed by Gary Shapiro, the head of the CTA, which is a lobbying group (among other things). He likes to write business books with "Ninja" in the title. You may disagree with me on their politics but I think we can find common ground in saying Ivanka Trump doesn't have a lot to say about Contrast Modulation as a method for counting pixels. CES is always a battleground between TV standards: Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD, LCD vs Plasma, LCD vs OLED, OLED vs MicroLED. This pixel counting thing is just this year's version of the TV wars. I don't want you to take away the message that I think that "actually, this debate over how to define 8K actually matters because of industry trend X," but these tussles between Samsung and LG do end up having repercussions in the long run. One technology or standard will win out and the other will lose and three years from now that winning technology will mean something tangible. I went to Best Buy in December and bought a cheap television for my parents because I was sick to death of their tiny screen. It cost less than our family dinner at a restaurant the night before and despite being a larger television than the one it replaced, it weighed half as much, had four times the resolution, supported HDR, and had good smart TV software built in. All that happened because several years ago these TV battles happened over HDR and what the best technology to light up a pixel might be. But I get it. Asking you to pay attention because in a few years what happens at CES will be commodified and change our gadgets is a tough sell. Car analogies are overused, but in this case it fits: just as only car enthusiasts really ought to pay attention to what happens at auto shows, so too only tech enthusiasts will care about the battle between the 8K Association and the CTA. Still: there are some things that get announced at CES that you'll genuinely want to buy and that will genuinely become available this year. As a tech journalist privy to embargoed information on many announcements, I already have identified a couple of things I'm eager to get. This gets to the idea of expectations: we have been trained to expect tech products to be consequential in our lives because smartphones have completely upended our entire understanding of what it even is to be in the world. Literally nothing can compare to that. But the universe of gadgets that surrounds the phone is important too, and CES is where we see the results of those gadgets being relentlessly improved. The biggest reason that you usually hear that CES doesn't matter is that all the most important companies don't make their most important announcements here. Apple is a no-show, Microsoft bailed, Samsung saves its best phones for later, and so on and so on. All true. But aren't we in a place where we don't want these giant companies to have such outsized control over tech? Wouldn't one way to combat that trend be actually paying attention to what smaller companies are trying to make? CES remains one of the best chances many companies have to claw a sliver of attention to their products. One last note: last year the biggest story of CES was the bone-headed decision to revoke a "Best of CES" award from a women's sex toy. Since then, CES has relented on allowing sex toys to be featured and has set up a section of the show floor for them — though it's unfortunately located far away from the main convention center. The whole saga sits at the nexus of gender politics and consumerism and the outrage the original decision caused led a big industry lobbying group to adopt a more progressive stance. This year, the sex toy in question might actually be on the show floor, and we intend to go check it out and not make coy jokes about it, but instead take it seriously. Because when it was denied the award last year, the company making it didn't have a working model to show. The more things change at CES, the more they stay the same. | 
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