What to expect at CES 2024

No single event of the year delivers more tech news than CES. The annual trade show is the starting point for each year in tech, giving companies a chance to announce their next wave of products or tease the ambitious, far-out, and often strange new projects they’ve been working on behind the scenes.

This year’s show kicks off from Las Vegas on Tuesday, January 9th and runs through Friday, January 12th, but you should expect news to start coming out as soon as, really, right now. Companies have been trickling out announcements over the past week, and many will try to preempt the conference with announcements in the days before the show floor opens up.

There’s also an entire day of keynote presentations ahead of the show’s official start. On Monday, expect news from LG, Samsung, Nvidia, Sony, and a whole lot more, as a lineup of companies from the tech and auto worlds run back-to-back presentations.

As always, The Verge will be covering the show inside and out. Here are some of the big stories we expect to see this year.

TVs

CES is first and foremost a show about new TVs. But it seems like we’re in for a relatively quiet, iterative year when it comes to new TV hardware. Last year, we saw meaningful leaps in brightness for OLED TVs, which made them suitable for brighter rooms and more viewing environments. And Mini LED became the status quo for mid- to high-end LCD TVs — at relatively affordable prices, to boot. 

But LG has already announced its 2024 lineup, and there aren’t any huge panel upgrades in store this year. Instead, the buzzy “new” thing from LG, Roku, and presumably other brands is centered around AI processing. We’ve seen TV makers use AI and machine learning to optimize picture and sound for a few years now, but they’re really leaning into it at CES 2024. Perhaps that’s no surprise given the rise of LLMs like ChatGPT, Bard, and others. With home theater, AI is being used to tweak settings that many consumers never bother adjusting themselves and give content greater depth and clarity. Picture purists will no doubt disable many of these AI tricks, but the trend is undeniable. 

The wild card, as ever, is Samsung. Will the leading TV manufacturer play it safe like many competitors, or does the company have something more groundbreaking in its back pocket? We’ll find out in Las Vegas in a matter of days. — Chris Welch

Transportation

While CES often masquerades as a car show, this year is likely to be different. Ford, General Motors, Stellantis, and a bunch of other notable names will be absent from the event. For that, you can thank the United Auto Workers strike over the summer, which led the Big Three to cancel their CES plans this year. 

But there will still be plenty of auto-focused announcements, from a new “global EV series” from Honda, to a flurry of in-car technology. And, of course, all of this will likely come with a sprinkling of our favorite tech buzzwords, including AI, LLMs, and machine learning. So keep your eyes peeled for that. 

In addition to Honda, major car companies like Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, and BMW will have news to share during CES. And Big Tech players like Intel and Amazon will be burnishing their status as emerging auto suppliers with some sneak peaks at new products coming in the future. So while there’s going to be less auto news to chew on than in years past, CES is still likely to dish up a few surprises for all the gearheads and mobility nerds in attendance. — Andrew J. Hawkins

Laptops

Intel just announced a whole new lineup of chips in the Meteor Lake family, and that means you can expect to see a whole lot of laptops at CES sporting the updated silicon. But a processor spec bump generally isn’t enough to catch the eye at the largest consumer electronics show in the world. 

CES is where laptop makers like to show off some of their flashiest new designs and funky little experiments they’ve been tinkering with. That means we should see at least one or two quirky devices that will have us pondering the evolution of the laptop’s design.

I’d also bet we’re going to see some bigger laptops. An adage at The Verge is people love big screens, and that love isn’t limited to phones and TVs. They want them in their laptops, too. With Apple recently embracing larger 14- and 16-inch displays, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of its competitors start following suit, moving us slowly away from the standard 13- and 15-inch laptop sizes to something a little roomier. — Alex Cranz

Smart Home

Expect to see a lot of smart home innovations based around two words: artificial intelligence. Samsung is setting the tone with its press conference titled “AI for All: Connectivity in the Age of AI,” (see how they got AI in there twice?!). The electronics giant has already announced smart cooktops, vacuums, and fridges with AI baked in, and I expect there’s more to come. LG will show off an AI-powered home robot with the catchy name “Smart Home AI Agent” that it claims will “understand context and intentions as well as actively communicate with users.” 

I’ll be watching closely to see what substance these companies put behind their AI claims. Context is definitely an area where AI could help improve smart home experiences, and generative AI has huge potential to simplify the smart home. I’ll be looking for solutions that take the burden of programming our smart homes off us and put it onto the computers. Smart home companies that can effectively implement this into their products will be one step ahead.

The other buzzword for the connected home at CES 2024 will, once again, be Matter. Named The Verge’s Best in Show last year, the new smart home standard stuttered in 2023. To regain momentum, I expect product announcements in the newly supported categories of robot vacuums and home appliances (Ecovacs, Roborock, GE Profile, and Whirlpool are all exhibiting this year), plus more products in underserved areas like smart locks and smart thermostats.

Overall, I predict it will be a quieter year on the gadget front. Many companies need to regroup and reassess their approach as the combined forces of Matter and AI begin to shape a brave new smart home. — Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

Gaming

CES can occasionally play host to a number of PC gaming announcements ahead of Computex in the summer, and it looks like the show will have a bunch for us this year. At CES 2024, we’re expecting to see Nvidia announce its first RTX 40-series Super cards, the first Super variants since the RTX 20-series. AMD is also rumored to be launching its own RX 7600 XT GPU later this month, potentially after CES concludes.

I’m most interested in the latest OLED monitors for PC gaming. At CES last year, we saw the first round of 240Hz OLED monitors, and it looks like these will expand in different shapes and sizes for 2024, alongside improved refresh rates. LG has pre-announced half a dozen new OLED gaming monitors, including one that’s capable of 480Hz at 1080p or 240Hz at 4K. LG Display even has a 27-inch OLED that can do up to 480Hz at 1440p that’s coming later this year. Samsung has also unveiled a new lineup of Odyssey OLED gaming monitors, with up to 360Hz refresh rates.

We may even see another handheld gaming PC. Both Asus and Lenovo have offered up their own alternatives to Valve’s popular Steam Deck, but there are a variety of other Windows-powered alternatives, too. MSI has dropped a big hint that it’s about to launch a ROG Ally and Steam Deck competitor. I’d be surprised if CES passes without another handheld gaming PC in the mix. — Tom Warren

Phones

As far as phone news goes, the weeks between October and mid-January are kind of like baseball’s All Star break. Sure, some of your favorite players are on the field, and there’s a game going on, but the real action comes later. This year, Samsung’s Unpacked is scheduled right on the heels of CES, on January 17th, with Mobile World Congress following in late February. That’s going to make this year’s CES a quiet one for mobile news.

Still, CES probably won’t be a total shutout. The first phones with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 have been trickling out, and we might get a glimpse of one or two more in Vegas. Qualcomm’s new flagship chipset leans into generative AI in a big way, and that’s definitely going to be a major theme throughout the year. And who knows? Maybe we’ll see some wacky flexible screen concepts from TCL. Those are always fun! — Allison Johnson

Wearables

Smartwatches have taken a backseat in recent years at CES, so don’t expect to see a lot on that front. Case in point: Fossil is usually a regular CES fixture, schlepping a mini horde of Android watches to Vegas each year. However, it won’t be there at all this year. That’s okay, though — CES is where weirder wearable ideas get to shine.  

I’d expect to see something wacky from Withings. Maybe not quite as out-there as last year’s at-home urinalysis device, but CES tends to be where the company showcases its vision for our telehealth future. Smart rings have also been simmering for a while, and even though many are not ready for primetime, I expect to see companies showing off their takes on a smaller, more discreet health tracker. It’s also likely that we’ll see a new round of over-the-counter hearing aids on the show floor, as well as concepts for AR smart glasses — especially now that Apple’s Vision Pro is lurking around the corner.

I’ve written about it before, but CES is where we see a lot of health tech ideas that never seem to make it to consumers (or won’t for several years at the minimum). I have no doubt there will be some exhibitors exploring noninvasive blood glucose monitoring, wearable blood pressure devices, and smart home telehealth gadgets. Beauty and wellness tech has become an increasing presence at the show, too. L’Oreal — which has a bigger tech presence than you’d think — is set to deliver a keynote this year, so I imagine they’ve got something cool planned, too. — Victoria Song