The new technology we expect and hope to see in Las Vegas

The holiday season has barely begun, but some of us are already gearing up for CES 2025. Shortly after New Year’s Day, many of the Engadget team will be packing their bags to fly to Las Vegas, where we’ll cover the biggest annual tech show. . conference. As usual, our inboxes are already flooded with presentations from companies planning to be there and our calendars are filling up with appointments for information sessions and demos.

Based on our experience, as well as observing recent industry trends, it’s pretty easy to make educated predictions about what we might see in January. Over the years, the conference’s focus has spanned areas such as televisions, automobiles, smart home products and personal health, with some laptops and accessories included. At CES 2025, we expect to see AI become even more ubiquitous in all areas. from the exhibition floor. But we’re also likely to get the usual slew of new processors and later laptops, as well as all sorts of wearables, trackers, bathroom appliances and massage chairs. Ah, the massage chairs.

If you’re already looking ahead to 2025 and carefully researching what could happen in January, here’s a sample of what our team expects to see at the show.

New video cards from AMD and NVIDIA

There is no doubt that 2025 will be a momentous year for PC gamers. NVIDIA is expected to unveil its long-awaited RTX 5000 video cards at CES, while AMD CEO Lisa Su has confirmed that we will see next-generation RDNA 4 GPUs early next year. Of the two companies, AMD could use the update more. Their latest batch of Radeon 7000 cards had decent mid-range performance, but they fell far behind NVIDIA’s hardware when it came to ray tracing, and AMD’s FSR 3 upgrade also couldn’t compete with the AI-powered DLSS 3 from NVIDIA.

“In addition to a sharp increase in gaming performance, RDNA 4 delivers significantly higher ray tracing performance and adds new AI capabilities,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said in an earnings conference call at October.

Regarding the new NVIDIA hardware, a rumor from the leaker a raichú (through Digital trends) suggested that the RTX 5090 could be up to 70 percent faster than the RTX 4090. (That’s a GPU I previously described as “ungodly powerful.”) They also note that other “high-end” cards could see 30 to 40 percent. performance hits. Those gains might be enough to tempt wealthy RTX 4090 owners to upgrade, but RTX 4070 and 4080 owners might want to skip this generation. However, for NVIDIA holdouts with RTX 3000 and older GPUs, next year may be the perfect time to upgrade. — Devindra Hardawar, Senior Reporter

PC with AI, round 2

Last year, I predicted that AI-enabled PCs would dominate CES, and that turned out to be true. As the year 2024 progressed, we saw even more powerful NPUs on chips from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. Microsoft also doubled down on AI PCs with its Copilot+ initiative, which gave a big marketing push to AI features and premium specs (like having at least 16GB of RAM).

Expect more of the same at CES 2025, as well as including even more AI across every product category imaginable. This year in particular, PC makers are likely preparing to take advantage of Windows 10 support that will end next year. Instead of simply upgrading your old computer to Windows 11, companies like Dell and HP would prefer that you buy a completely new AI PC with the new operating system preinstalled.

While 2024 was a year of endless hype for AI PCs, 2025 could end up being a year of reckoning. Microsoft’s long-delayed recovery feature is slowly reaching more users, but it already shows some glaring security holes, such as do not delete social security and credit card numbers from screenshots. We were also disappointed with Apple Intelligence’s imaging capabilities. PC makers have been eager to talk about the potential of AI-powered features until now, but in 2025 they will have to prove that they can live up to their fantastic claims. — HD

Headphones that follow Apple’s lead in hearing health

I am fully aware that not all audio companies have the ability to create clinical-grade hearing tests and hearing aid features in their applications. However, Apple’s recent update to the AirPods Pro 2 should inspire the competition to offer some kind of hearing health tools in their flagship products. Jabra was probably the best equipped to do this, as parent company GN has extensive experience in headphones. Unfortunately, the company announced earlier this year that it would no longer be making headphones.

Samsung and Google could probably integrate something similar to what Apple did for AirPods, given both companies’ existing health platforms. If they did, it’s unlikely those announcements would be made at CES, as both companies prefer to host their own independent hardware events throughout the year.

That leaves Sennheiser as the largest audio company consistently releasing headphones and earphones at CES. Last year, it introduced several new models, including one with heart rate tracking for workouts. Plus, it already offers hearing assistance with dedicated devices like the true wireless Conversation Clear Plus. Those headphones focus more on listening than general content consumption, so it would be great to see Sennheiser incorporate some features from that product into its flagship Momentum line of headphones. Perhaps a Momentum True Wireless 4 Pro or Plus is on the cards, but the current model is only nine months old.

Of course, there’s plenty of room for other companies to innovate here, and there will be no shortage of new headsets in Las Vegas next month. We also tend to see a lot of assistive device and technology launches at CES, from major accessibility companies like OrCam and all sorts of smaller brands. I just hope that some of the new technology includes more general hearing tools in the models that most people will want to use. — Billy Steele, Senior Editor

Vehicle electrification soars

As the growth of electric cars approaches 10 percent of new models sold In the United States, it’s easy to forget that wheeled vehicles aren’t the only type of transportation shifting to battery propulsion. Flying taxis have been a mainstay of CES for the past few years, with concept vehicles from brands as big as Hyundai dotting the show floor in Las Vegas.

Of course, these contraptions look more like giant drones with cockpits than anything the Jetsons have come up with. But with companies like Archer Aviation and Joby Aviation promising to launch eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) services in 2025, the era of air taxis may have truly landed this time. — Sam Rutherford, Senior Reporter

Expanded dialogue enhancement features in sound bars

When it comes to the main aspects of sound bars, there really isn’t much innovation year after year. Heck, Samsung’s biggest update last year was adding HDMI 2.1 support to its flagship model, which should have already been there. Companies have also focused on transitioning to wire-free everything, whether it’s wireless Dolby Atmos or wireless streaming boxes. Audio enhancement features are one place where companies can really stand out, and tools like TV Audio Swap from Sonos and Personal Surround Sound from Bose are great examples of this. One key area that almost every business can improve is dialogue enhancement, a feature that increases the volume or separates the spoken word from background noise and music for clarity.

Sonos took a big leap in this regard in the Arc Ultra, offering two additional settings for so-called speech enhancement. Previously, this was just an all or nothing option, which is how most companies handle their versions of this tool. Sonos’ update is not only customizable to some extent, but it’s also better, thanks in part to the redesigned architecture of its new premium soundbar. This is an obvious area where other companies can improve.

LG and Samsung often announce new sound bars at CES, and there are plenty of smaller companies that will debut some as well. I’d love to see you all take the dialogue improvements a step further and at least offer multiple options for how it’s applied. LG has been using AI Sound Pro in its TVs since 2021 and Samsung offers something called Adaptive Sound in its home theater speakers. I would expect both to generally improve the quality of their features, but I hope they also expand the capabilities. — Degree