This year’s #CES2020 was the usual spectacle of gadgets, gizmos, pleasant surprises, and near misses. Most of all CES continues to be an event where you can see the raw material of the next big thing far more often than you can see the next big thing. That so often frustrates people who hope for a romantic view of the old days “remember when they previewed the VCR or Atari?” If you expect CES to be that, you will have been disappointed for the past 50 years or so.

Instead, CES is a show where invention meets innovation — inventions are the ingredients of products, not necessarily products. An innovation is the result of an invention meeting the best execution of product, price, place, and promotion, usually taking many iterations from many companies.

CES is the primordial soup of innovation, not a shopping mall.

Then one day that cool invention, like digital cameras, once new categories get absorbed into a another invention and the cycle starts over.

Today’s world of instant communication, open development of products, horizontal and vertical integration of companies, and global competition put far more of this out in the open for all to see…and comment on.

CES is the primordial soup of innovation, not a shopping mall.

These show notes are for the lovers of change, innovation, risk taking, and critical thinking. There’s nothing in this report to click on to buy (and no sponsored links!) I’m just one person who has been coming here for decades who walks around, talks to the people staffing booths, and tries to take in as much as I can in 104,715 steps iPhone and notebook in hand. Mistakes in here are my own and if you DM me I will endeavor to fix them. I’m pretty tired right now! Also, there’s a disclaimer at the end.

Every single product, nearly or maybe literally, had USB connectivity. Every. Single. Product. Did anyone predict that? (tl;dr NO, not even the people that worked on USB.)

As I walked around this year I found my mind wandering back to inventions that made little sense to me at the time or whose implications I wildly underestimated. The list is almost embarrassing: digital cameras, GPS, USB. Or perhaps the places I spent too much time on thinking they would be big: universal remote controls, media servers, or home theater components.

As an example, every single product, nearly or maybe literally, had USB connectivity. Every. Single. Product. Did anyone predict that? (tl;dr NO, not even the people that worked on USB.)

When USB came out in 1998, it was designed to solve the problem of annoying PS/2 connectors for mice and keyboards. Intel, Microsoft, and a few others got together to solve the problem. There was an interesting launch showing how “simple” the new connector would be (if you could orient it correctly). It was a yawner of an announce at COMDEX and then CES, really (with a little booth representing the association in the middle of those big company booths.) Apple with its iMac and then Compaq announced “legacy free PCs” (Compaq iPaq, “i” was in everything that year.) And began to usher in PCs that ditched parallel, serial, PS/2 complexity. Soon that connector launched without much fanfare began to gain momentum but no one thought it all that exciting.

Then USB 2.0 came out and what should have been exciting became the source of industry-wide confusion — “is it high speed or not…how will people know”. BUT, as it would turn out then came USB storage. And all of a sudden the world was awash in little sticks of memory that were the savior for people sharing music, big PowerPoint decks, or bringing work home. I chronicled the rise of USB from the Intel booth to the component booths at the Hilton (Westgate now) to the ever-growing booths of Sandisk or Kingston. By chronicled, I mean I was puzzled at the scale of just how many companies could make thumb drives and have booths at CES.

Then inventors started adding USB connectors to all sorts of devices. USB networking. USB wi-fi. Even USB to add back analog modems. Then TVs mysteriously got USB ports. Then USB video adapters to connect your VCR to a PC. And on and on. Soon mobile phones started using USB to simply charge, rooted in the history of needing to connect a cell phone to a PC in order to download ringtones or “apps”.

All along the way, each year, many would notice the new features but nothing would seem breakthrough. Then there would be a big announce like a new connector or a new working group and some would be excited while others would bemoan the additional complexity that came from the addition. Micro, Mini (4 or 5 pin), A, B, C…then dongles, adapters, hubs (never enough USB ports should have been a sign!) All along the way, each year, many would notice the new features but nothing would seem breakthrough.

Now instead of the challenges of too little power, we have a USB plug that can literally power the most powerful consumer electronics devices we need. Heck, there are home outlets with USB-C in them now that you can buy at Home Depot.

Yet here we are at CES in 2020, more than 20 years after USB was introduced and can safely say it was a big deal.

That’s what CES is really like. Replace USB with digital camera, WiFi, LCD, and more and the story would be the same. Excitement, under-estimation, confusion, complexity, then ubiquity. Or maybe it goes the way of 3D TV or media servers.

That’s why I go to CES. That’s also why it is so difficult to really know what is the next big thing. Innovation, like the spinning of the earth, is so constant we just don’t always feel it or take the time to acknowledge it.

The uniqueness of CES2020 is the scale at which innovations are touching the world, and with that come challenges. While few (perhaps saving a couple of audacious people we know too well) believed the PC would arrive in the home when it debuted at CES in 1980 or so, 4 years after the Apple ][. Even at peak, however, the PC only directly reached 1/7th of the world. It was fair to keep searching for the next big thing.

CES today is intertwined with a consumer electronics device, the smartphone, that touches nearly every person on earth. Searching for the next big thing after that is not just a tall order, it might require a new planet and population. The idea that a single category of consumer electronics would reach planetary scale is, honestly, inconceivable.

That transformation means that every company interacts with smartphones. Every booth, every product, every technology. This is out of necessity — who would use something that doesn’t connect to a phone. This is out of opportunity — if someone has a phone then riding that momentum seems prudent. This is out of utility — using a phone, a product doesn’t need a screen, UI, or connectivity on its own.

But is that always right? Does that always work?

Beyond that, many products take elements of the smartphone and incorporate them into their own innovations. The global supply chain makes that easy, perhaps too easy. That’s why it is ok to be critical. Entrepreneurs (in new companies and in big companies) are experimenting and bringing products to market — taking risks (financial, reputational, personal) so being snarky about that isn’t always fair. It is fair to think critically about how something might play out. There’s also a good chance of being wrong, as history has told me (I still can’t believe there’s such a thing as a DSLR!)

This also means the show is changing. It isn’t clear to me if there will ever be another major product surprise debut at CES. More likely a product a few know about breaks through at CES for one reason or another. The Show itself is different now. Many companies never make it to exhibit on the main floor, opting for less expensive and harder to find hotel rooms off the floor. The primary role of the show, to help retailers plan on their stockage, is an antiquated process. In many ways, CES feels like a “department store” when the role of aggregating everything into one place is less valuable (there was a time when Macy’s had an electronics department!) Instead the show now serves almost as a check on incubation and a way for the supply chain to exercise itself. CES isn’t the destination, but a step on the journey.

That reality makes learning from the show even more important, but much more work to understand and turn into actions.

The remainder of this report looks at 12 different technologies/categories and what I saw. Plenty of photos as photos tell the story. If you’re looking for details or specifics on any particular product, check out the great coverage from the professionals who do much better than me.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed the process of creating it.

1. Folding Screens: So now what?

Those are the shipping PCs. There were a number of prototype PCs not covered under the folding section, but containing multiple screens. The Dell Duet (really?) concept is a dual screen folding laptop. Windows supports two screens but as discussed in the mobile section I have my doubts this is set up for mainstream usage. Going back to the Folding Screens section and the Intel Horseshoe device, if you’re going to have a lot of screen most people will want the most rows and columns. With Windows (unlike the Android devices) you can stretch across screens but that isn’t usable. With Windows you also need a place to type — externally if this is a “professional” device and a way for the device to stand up. All of this is getting complicated and futzy. Exactly what techies love 😉 This is reminding me of convertible tablet PCs when techies loved all the gymnastics and modes of the device and everyone else wanted a laptop.

Lenovo has a Thinkbook folding device featuring an e-ink display as well. I wasn’t sure what to make of this.

Returning to the idea of professional use, I wanted to show some of the many USB-C docks that covered the show floor. These were popularized by the MacBook (because if you’re going to go minimal have a single port!) but now are a key part of Windows PCs as well. There are a lot of choices. From minimalistic that offer power, one i/o port, and HDMI, to crazy sets of ports.

If I were offering a PC today, I would consider the dock as a key part of the offering and assume most professionals would want the dock because most people will use the PC stationary a bulk of the time (or even all the time). This implies a slim and integrated design.

A dock like this is Linedock for the Macbook Pro. It essentially doubles the size of a Macbook adding an extended life battery, numerous ports, and even storage (ok that’s not for me). I think if you’re a professional doing mobile work or want to turn a Macbook into a desktop, this is the kind of dock that makes a lot of sense in terms of design and feature set.

If you work with your macbook closed or maybe off to the side as a second monitor, this dock has all the ports in a keyboard.It could also be a replacement for any slate form factor PC keyboard.

At the extreme end of more traditional docks, this one had so many ports squeezed through USB-C I was overwhelmed. At the very least it is an incredible engineering accomplishment. That’s optical audio and even an RCA jack, along with VGA, RJ45, displayport and card readers.

There are also cases/docks for the iPad. The Brydge keyboard cover is a nice alternative to the Apple cover, though it adds quite a bit of weight. Beyond the weight, it has a real problem in that the connectors block the iOS dock and swipe up motion. This is something that prevented me from using it. For you Surface users, this is a common challenge with the Surface keyboard in the tilted position — so I am always having to do the extra step to flatten the keyboard (the magnets keep it tilted by default). I decided to ask the product manager at the booth about this along with the delay in the keyboard for the 5th gen iPad mini. And guess what (!) he explained they were working through a design change to add an recessed point in the middle to allow for swipe up. Kind of a hack but validating 🙂

Also from Brydge is this headturner/eye roller. It is an iPad Pro keyboard with a trackpad. Of course this utilizes the accessibility touch pointer in iOS to simulate a mouse. Well maybe this is a harbinger of things to come.

In an ODM booth there was an iPad Pro “dock” which fit nicely around the edge (securely sort of) and added audio, card readers, HDMI. I left with unanswered questions.

In addition to a dock, I think professionals will use multiple monitors more and more — Apple supporting an iPad as a second monitor is a pretty cool solution for developers that travel with a MacBook and iPad. But sometimes you really want multiple monitors. USB-C to the rescue. This gadget adds a second (or third) monitor to any PC. It has a fancy case/travel stand that makes the whole thing work for developers or gamers!

12. Energy: Batteries!

There was a time when the biggest problem when setting up a booth at CES was getting enough power, because every demo station on the show floor needed about 1000 watt and with 20–30–40 stations per booth the power draw was astronomical (brown outs at the show were common events.) Now most everything runs on low voltage DC or just the internal battery. Our homes are rapidly becoming that as well, first our cars, then maybe soon we will all have stored energy from the sun at home.

This brings batteries and alternate power front and center to the show. While aux batteries for phones were ubiquitous exactly like thumb drives were (and probably the same distributors in China), much larger, and I will make this word up, generator-alternative batteries, are now ubiquitous. This is an interesting category because what drives this is more the rest of world, rural Asia and Africa where the power grid is less present and reliable, not just campers and preppers in the US.

Goal Zero/Yeti has one of the larger presences on the floor and a wide range of products. They were even showing their own generator alternative bypass setup using stacked cells that they wire into the main circuit breaker (boat owners or cabin dwellers will recognize this as car batteries strung together).

All of these batteries have USB ports, meters, and AC outlets. The cost has gone way down and reliability way up.

Alternative energy sources were represented as well. Solar is a key part of the equation with Goal Zero and others always showing roll out solar mats to charge these larger batteries. Another way of charging is to use the wind. I loved this portable wind power generator which is about the same output as a 2×3 foot solar mat, except it operates 24 hours a day. This is the kind of thing used in cabins and on explorations. It is built as one would expect and folds up into a case the side of a shoebox.

There’s a new wave of EV chargers for home that also do bi-directional charging. This is kind of a wild idea where you can deliver the stored charge in your car back to the grid at certain hours. This is really around optimizing costs and also in the event of an outage one could run the home on the car, though frankly using the car to get out of town seems like a good idea too.

Not every battery has to be huge. Every once in a while a single product shows up mysteriously everywhere all at once. This year it was a USB rechargeable flashlight with a jumpstart plug attachment. Keep this charging in the car all the time and you have an emergency flashlight, phone battery, or jumpstart. So that’s neat. I ordered one from the floor. One is pictured in the photo at the section start, ignore the red standard battery they would not let me move for the photo.

There were plenty of phone chargers. Wireless Qi is no longer an novelty and any surface you can image was being shown as a charger. iHome’s line of clock radios is immense. I loved this wireless charger only because I am trying to imagine who knows how many watts they need from a USB plug. USB continues its journey.

Saving energy comes in many forms and I wanted to mention this long shot product that I simply loved for brilliance. Like pretty much everyone, I get too many boxes and feel awful. I carefully flatten and recycle them free of labels but really wonder. “The Box” is a product designed to be a reusable mass-market shipping container. It is a super rigid, lightweight, collapsible, padded box of a standard side that can ship a good sized standard box or a flat pak. There’s even integrated padding. This has been done before (it reminded me of the reusable moving boxes that can be rented now).

Where this gets “smart” it gets interesting. There is an e-ink display on the outside and an app that lets you affix any standard shipping label exactly as if you printed it (sort of a stamps.com thing). It has NFC, tracking, and in the next version even an interior camera.

Obviously the costs of this would be insane and there’s the obvious problem of getting the box back into circulation if you are not a shipment originator. To solve this the company is trying an elaborate funding model that essentially has bulk users buying equity in the company to be returned as the network expands.

It really got me thinking about how containerization modernized shipping across land-sea-air and what is needed is a last mile shipping. Amazon began to think of this with the grocery box. They are now in a position to do something long these lines within their shipping network or perhaps across carriers. I am really intrigued by solving this problem. I know someone reading this will also do the math over how much energy it takes to make a box like this compared to other boxes, which literally grow on trees.