The new technology we expect (and hope) to see in January

The holiday season has barely begun, but some of us are already gearing up for CES 2025. Shortly after the New Year, many of the Engadget team will be packing our bags to fly to Las Vegas, where we’ll be covering tech’s biggest annual conference. As usual, our mailboxes are already flooded with offers from companies planning to attend, and our calendars are filling up with meetings for briefings and demonstrations.

Based on our experience, as well as observing recent industry trends, it’s relatively easy to make educated guesses about what we might see in January. Over the years, the focus of the conference has spanned areas such as televisions, automobiles, smart home products and personal health, with minor additions to laptops and accessories. At CES 2025, we expect AI to become even more pervasive in all areas of the show floor. But we’re also likely to get the usual array of new processors and subsequent laptops, as well as all manner of wearables, trackers, bathroom gadgets and massage chairs. Oh, the massage chairs.

There are already many that we know are coming, with just a glimpse the lineup published by The Consumer Technology Association (CTA). In addition to numerous panels and talks, there will be keynotes from NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen HuangDelta CEO Ed Bastian, as well as C-suite executives from companies such as Panasonic, SiriusXM, Waymo and the Volvo group. This gives us an idea of ​​who might make big announcements at the show.

If you’re already looking ahead to 2025. and diligently 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 is going to be an important year for PC gamers. NVIDIA is expected to debut its long-awaited RTX 5000 graphics cards at CES, while AMD CEO Lisa Su confirmed that we’ll see next generation RDNA 4 GPUs early next year. Of the two companies, AMD could use the upgrade more. That’s it the latest batch of Radeon 7000 cards were decent mid-range performers, but fell far behind NVIDIA’s hardware when it came to ray tracing, and AMD’s FSR 3 boost couldn’t compete with NVIDIA’s AI-powered DLSS 3 either.

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

As for NVIDIA’s new hardware, a leaked rumor One Raichu (through DigitalTrends) suggests that the RTX 5090 could be up to 70 percent faster than the RTX 4090. (This is a GPU that previously described as having “unholy power”.) They also note that other “high-end” cards can see a 30 to 40 percent jump in performance. Those gains may be enough to tempt wealthy RTX 4090 owners to upgrade, but RTX 4070 and 4080 owners may want to skip this generation. For NVIDIA, who are giving up on RTX 3000 and earlier GPUs, however, next year might be the perfect time to upgrade. — Devindra Hardawar, Senior Reporter

AI computers round 2

Last year, I predicted that AI-powered PCs would dominate CES, and that largely proved to be true. As 2024 approaches we’ve seen even more powerful NPUs in chips from Intel, AMD and Qualcomm. Microsoft also doubled the number of AI computers its Copilot+ initiativewhich gave a big marketing push for AI features and premium specs (like having at least 16GB of RAM).

Expect more of the same at CES 2025, along with even more artificial intelligence crammed into every product category imaginable. This year, in particular, PC manufacturers are likely to be gearing up to take advantage Windows 10 support ends next year. Instead of just upgrading your old PC to Windows 11, companies like Dell and HP prefer you to buy an entirely new AI PC with a new operating system pre-installed.

Until 2024 it was a year of endless AI PC hype, 2025. it could turn out to be a year of reckoning. Microsoft’s long-delayed call feature is slowly trickling out to more users, but it’s already showing some glaring security holes like failed to delete social security numbers and credit cards from screenshots. We have been too mostly dissatisfied with the imaging capabilities of Apple Intelligence. PC makers have been reluctant to talk about the potential of AI-powered features until now, but in 2025. they will have to actually prove that they can justify their fantastic claims. — DH

Headphones that follow Apple’s lead in hearing health

I am fully aware that not every audio company has the ability to upgrade clinical hearing test and hearing aid characteristics in their applications. However, Apple’s recent update to the AirPods Pro 2 should inspire the competition to offer some form of hearing health tools on their flagship products. Jabra was perhaps best equipped for this, as parent company GN has extensive experience with hearing aids. Unfortunately, the company announced earlier this year that wouldn’t make headphones anymore.

Samsung and Google could probably integrate something like what Apple did for AirPods, given both companies’ existing health platforms. If they did, these announcements are unlikely to be made at CES, as both companies prefer to hold their own standalone hardware events throughout the year.

That leaves Sennheiser as the biggest audio company to consistently launch headphones and earphones at CES. It was demonstrated last year many new modelsincluding one with heart rate tracking for workouts. Plus, it now offers hearing aid with special devices like true wireless Clear Plus talk. These headphones are more focused on listening than general content consumption, so it would be great to see Sennheiser implement some features from this product into their flagship line of Momentum ear tips. Perhaps a Momentum True Wireless 4 Pro or Plus is in the plans, but the current model is only nine months old.

There’s certainly plenty of room for other companies to innovate here, and there’ll be no shortage of new headsets in Vegas next month. We also tend to see a lot launching assistive devices and technologies at CESfrom major accessibility companies such as OrCam and any smaller brands. I just hope that some of the new technology includes more general hearing tools on models that most people will want to use. — Billy Steele, Senior Editor

The electrification of vehicles is reaching the sky

As the growth of electric cars approaches 10 percent of new models sold in the US, it’s easy to forget that wheeled vehicles aren’t the only mode of transportation making the switch to battery power. Flying taxis have been a mainstay at CES for the past few years, with concept vehicles from brands like Hyundai littered the Vegas show floor.

Of course, these contraptions look more like giant drones with cockpits than anything the Jetsons ever dreamed of. But with companies like Archer Aviation and Joby Aviation promising to actually launch eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) services in 2025, the era of air taxis may have arrived for real this time. — Sam Rutherford, senior reporter

Advanced features to improve the sound bars dialog

When it comes to the basic aspects of soundbars, there really isn’t much innovation from year to year. Hell, Samsung’s biggest update last year was the addition of HDMI 2.1 support to its lead model, which should have been there already. Companies are also focused on the transition to wireless everything, whether it’s wireless Dolby Atmos or wireless transmission boxes. Audio enhancement features are where companies can really rise above collision and similar tools Sonos TV Sound Exchange and Bose’s personal surround sound are great examples of this. A key area that almost every company can improve is dialogue amplification, a feature that raises the volume or separates the spoken word from background noise and music for better clarity.

Sonos has made a huge leap in this regard Arc Ultraoffering two additional settings for t. called Speech improvement. Before, it was just an all-or-nothing toggle, which is how most companies handle their versions of this tool. Not only is the Sonos update somewhat customizable, it’s also simply better, thanks in part to the redesigned architecture of the new premium soundbar. This is an obvious area where other companies can improve.

LG and Samsung usually announce new soundbars at CES, and there are plenty of smaller companies that will debut as well. I’d love to see them all take dialog improvements a step further and at the very least give multiple options for how it’s implemented. LG uses AI Sound Pro from its 2021 TVs, and Samsung offers something called Adaptive Sound on its home theater speakers. I’d expect both to generally improve the quality of their features, but hopefully they’ll expand the capabilities as well. — BS

Update, December 17, 2024, 12:40 PM ET: This story has been updated to include the companies and CEOs who will be making keynote remarks at the show.