(gentle music)
- CES 2021 is over.
CES 2020 was also virtual.
Now, a virtual thing is not technically real.
So if it was never real in the first place,
can it actually be over?
Yes, CES 2021 is over.
And because it was virtual,
we were expecting it to be a pretty slow show
but it turns out there were some really interesting trends
and things that happened this year.
Now, CES is not a show where you should expect
there to be huge flagship announcements,
of products that you can go out and buy right away.
That's just not what the show is.
It's a show about the parts of gadgets
like the screens and the processors.
It's a lot of promises basically.
And that doesn't mean that it's vaporware,
but it does mean that what you learn from CES
is about the trends and things that are going to happen
a little bit later,
not things that you can go out and buy right now.
But that said, I do think that some of those trends
are really interesting.
And so I wanna talk about a few of those promises.
The first big trend of CES is the same trend as every CES,
and that there are a lot of concept devices.
These are things that might not necessarily get made
but that doesn't mean that they're vaporware.
It means that some companies have produced some things
that are really interesting
and that might turn into products
or might tell you what a future product
is going to look like.
And the concept that ran away with the show
was Razor's Project Hazel.
It has an N95 rating or at least it's supposed to,
if it ever gets certified.
It uses little gaskets to breathe
but there will be filters on them.
It's clear so that people can see you speaking,
which is really interesting.
It has a silicon thing over your nose
so hopefully it won't fog up glasses.
It also has a microphone
and a speaker that razor says it's working with THX to tune
so that your voice doesn't sound muffled when
you're wearing the mask.
That it sounds natural.
Of course it's rechargeable.
Of course it comes in a case
with a UV light to disinfect it or whatever.
And of course, because it's Razor,
it's gonna have RGB lights that you can set
to do all sorts of fancy color things.
This is a cool idea.
I don't know if they're actually gonna make it.
And it's part of another trend
that I just wanna mention on the side,
which is there were a lot of COVID gadgets this year
and I was very, very nervous going into CES
that what we were going to see is,
we'll call it COVID profiteering,
a bunch of gadgets that don't actually help anybody,
that are very scientifically unsound,
that are just taking advantage
of people's fear of this pandemic.
Luckily, it wasn't as bad as I thought.
We have seen a few things
like thermometers built into doorbells
that I don't think are very useful because the science,
external thermometers like that, isn't very good.
We also saw a bunch of UV gadgets to disinfect stuff
and that's fine, but overall, companies were relatively good
about not taking advantage of people's fear of the pandemic.
I don't think Razor did either but I will tell you
that the problem that we have with the pandemic right now,
isn't enough smart tech.
The problem is that people aren't being smart themselves.
They're not wearing masks,
they're not social distancing, not as much as we need.
So please do that.
And Razor as cool as this Project Hazel thing is,
I am more impressed with the fact
that you switched one of your factories over to making masks
for healthcare workers
and that you gave away a million of them.
Thank you for doing that.
And if you decide you actually wanna produce
this Project Hazel smart mask,
yeah, I'll take some flaky lights on my face, why not?
We saw a bunch of other regular kind of CES concepts.
Of course we saw concept cars
and we also saw a bunch of concept screens.
Like for example, LG has a semi-transparent screen
which is a very good idea.
They're showing it off again
that's even more transparent than before,
but for some reason they think you're gonna wanna put it
at the foot of your bed and have it rise up on a motor.
Sure, why not?
The main thing that we see with concept screens
is that they bend and fold.
And so TCL, which is trying really hard to prove
that it's a big deal now,
showed off a bunch of different bendy screens
that showed up off thing that was like literally a scroll.
Maybe someday, I don't know.
The rolly screen that I'm most impressed with
is LG's rollable phone.
It's a phone where it sort of rolls out
to become a tablet-size thing
or rolls back into the regular form factor that you expect.
It is just a concept but LG says
they are going to sell one this year.
LG also makes the Wing though
so they're probably not gonna sell that many of them
but just getting one out the door will be interesting.
I want a phone that turns into a tablet
and a foldable is one way to do it
and a rollable is a really interesting, different way.
(gentle music)
The next big thing that happened at CES
has to do with processors and laptops.
So let's talk about processors and laptops.
We had keynote presentations from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia.
And you put all them together,
what I think you're going to get are gaming laptops in 2021
that are very, very interesting and very good, I hope.
So Intel, it has a bunch of new core chips
and you probably know by now
that Intel has had a rough go of it lately.
They had to sell off their modem business to Apple.
They're competing with Apple, with Apple's new M1 chip
which is very good in terms of performance per watt
and Intel is having a hard time getting down
to the 10 and seven nanometer process for making its chips
which we know are more power efficient
or more powerful per watt.
Anyway, Intel, they're doing their best
with kind of what they got.
They do have some interesting things coming
but we will have to see
if they are like significantly better
or if we're still playing the waiting game with them.
Then there's AMD, which has another generation
of its Ryzen processors
running on the seven nanometer process,
which means that they can be very powerful
without completely destroying your battery.
I'm very interested to see what these are like
and I'm also kind of hoping
that they're actually easier to find
'cause they weren't in a ton of laptops last year
but the ones that they were in were very, very good.
Finally, there is Nvidia, which is bringing down some GPU's
to gaming laptops that are actually more powerful
than I would have guessed as early as they're coming.
I want to figure out to take it a little bit longer
for this much power to come to gaming laptops.
And by this much power what I mean is,
proper 1440P resolutions running at 90 frames per second.
That seems like it's completely a doable thing
on gaming laptops this year in form factors
that aren't like three inches thick and weigh eight pounds.
Now, after all these announcements were made,
there were a ton of laptop announcements
because all those parts were public
and so all the companies are making laptop talks
about all of those parts.
We're interested in a bunch of them
but the one that I'm most interested in
is the successor to this guy right here,
the Republic of Gamers, Zephyrus G14 or whatever.
If there's a G15, that's gonna use this design
and it's gonna have, I hope really, really good performance.
And I think it's gonna be
one of our favorite laptops of 2021 if it pans out
because this guy right here
was one of our favorite laptops of 2020.
Now, if you're not interested in gaming laptops,
what is all this chip and gaming laptop stuff
actually mean to you?
Well, watch Intel.
See, on the one front they're fighting Apple,
which has its ARM chips on its laptops,
Qualcomm is trying to make a thing with ARM and Windows,
we'll see how that goes,
and AMD is hard-charging on the x86 side,
Intel sort of stuck in the middle, trying to make it work.
And they have a new chip that's called Alder Lake
that sort of takes some of the ideas from ARM
in terms of a big powerful processor
and a little high efficient cores
to improve battery life and just sort of improve
overall performance on a laptop.
And that is gonna be their big chance to try and take on
the M1 chip with head-to-head performance.
We shall see, but that is the best bet
that they've got for 2021
and I'll be very, very interested to see
what ultra-light laptops with that chip look like.
And if they can be competitive
with what's coming from Apple.
(gentle music)
If you know anything about CES,
you know that what it really is deep down in its heart
and its soul, what it truly wants to be is a TV show.
And so of course, we got a bunch of TV announcements.
We got TV announcements before CES
even technically began because it was trying
to get out ahead of it.
And this year, the thing for you to remember
if you're not buying a high-end TV,
if you're just buying a TV is make sure you get one
with HTMI 2.1.
It's pretty much everywhere
but it's pretty much the best way for you to be sure
that you're gonna be at least a little bit future-proof.
Now, you're gonna have to check a whole bunch of specs
to make sure it can support all of the stuff
that you might want from a PS5 or an Xbox Series X
if you're getting one of those
or if you're lucky to have already bought one,
but at the very least, HDMI 2.1 is a start.
Now, in terms of high-end TV technology,
the big story here is mini-LED versus OLED.
You might know that OLED TVs are really good
because they can have truly black blacks
and then bright whites.
You get a high contrast ratio.
They look amazing and LG is the king of making OLED TVs.
But there's a competing technology.
It is mini-LED and what it tries to do is have the light
that shines behind the pixels be ever, ever smaller
so there's more dimming zones
so that it can get true black as well.
The advantage to mini-LED is that it's not organic
which means that it should last longer
and there's fewer banning concerns.
The disadvantage is they have to do a lot of work
to get those mini-LEDs more and more mini
so that they can get closer to the true black
that you can get from OLED.
Samsung thinks it's really getting there,
it's pushing it hard.
And another company, TCL, is also pushing mini-LED.
Now, you might think of TCL just as a sort of a value brand.
They make very good TVs for the money
and they run Roku software.
We've loved TCL TVs for a long time.
They really wanna be LG.
They wanna show that they are a big high technology company
and you should pay attention to their innovation
and so they are pushing mini-LED as well.
But LG is not just sitting still,
their OLED TVS they claim are brighter
and that's one of the few knocks on OLED TVs
besides, you know, apparently expensive,
is that they don't necessarily get bright enough
if you've got a really sunny living room.
And so LG is promising that it's TVs
can be brighter than ever.
Will any of this matter to you
if you're trying to buy a TV in 2021?
Maybe if you're gonna spend lots of money on a TV
but what really does matter
with all of this high technology
mini-LED versus OLED stuff is,
if you're gonna buy a TV down the road,
all this stuff is gonna eventually trickle down to TVs
that cost more a reasonable amount of money.
Oh, one more thing that's interesting
with TVs is smart TV software.
Sony is switching over from Android TV to Google TV
which is the Googlefied version of Android TV.
I think that's good.
I think Google TV is actually pretty solid.
LG has taken WebOS and made it act
less like the old WebOS worked
and more just like a standard, boring, smart TV interface.
I mean, just look how they massacred my boy.
Now like I said, this is all trend stuff.
You're not gonna be able to go out
and buy pretty much any of this stuff today.
You will get some of it later this year
but this is telling you where technology is going
not what you can go out and buy today.
And so it's stuff to watch out for.
If you are looking for something
that you can just go out and buy today,
well, guess what?
Samsung just announced the Galaxy S21 series,
and we've got a hands-on.
I'm gonna be reviewing it very soon.
You can check that out
because it is the flagship Android phone
for the year for Samsung
as well as the CES stuff and all the promises
that all these tech companies are making.
Well, you know what?
Actually some of it does seem pretty promising.
Thanks so much for watching.
Let me know what you thought the best stuff CES was
down in the comments below.
There was a ton of things that I couldn't get to.
There were new WIFI 6E routers,
there were some other concept cars
and there was this ice cream maker
that sort of works like a courier machine,
where you'd like drop a can
and it just gives you a soft serve.
People are really excited about it
because I guess people wanna pay too much for ice cream.
I love ice cream, I don't need to spend
that much money on it.