CES kicks off in Vegas next week and I already know what's going to happen. There will be a stage, a giant LED wall, some Intel exec saying "ultrabook" about forty times, and by Friday half of what got announced will quietly vanish and never get mentioned again. And I'll still be refreshing liveblogs at 6 AM my time like it's the Super Bowl. I don't totally know why.
I've been thinking about this because a reader emailed me after my Kindle Fire post back in November asking why I even bother caring about CES announcements when "none of it ships." Fair question. Go back and look at CES 2011: the Motorola Atrix 4G laptop dock, remember that? A phone that turned into a laptop shell. Cool idea, I actually wanted one for about three weeks, and then it just sort of died a quiet death in carrier stores nobody visited. Or all the 3D TV stuff from the last two or three years running, every booth had a 3D demo, every CEO said 3D was the future of the living room, and I don't know a single person who owns a 3D TV or has ever expressed the desire to own one. My uncle has one he got as some bundle deal and the glasses live in a drawer.
So yeah. Vaporware, or at least "technically real but nobody will ever buy it" ware, is basically the house style of CES. It's a trade show built for press releases, not actual product roadmaps, and everybody in the industry knows it going in.
But here's the thing, I still care, and I think the reason is that CES isn't really about the products, it's about which direction everyone's pointing at once. You watch the CES presentations less for "will I buy this specific object" and more for "what is every hardware company suddenly agreeing is the next thing." Last year at this show it was tablets everywhere, dozens of them, most forgettable, but that was the year that told you tablets were about to actually be a category and not just an iPad-shaped niche. This year it sounds like it's going to be ultrabooks, thin laptops chasing what the MacBook Air already did, with Intel apparently throwing a pretty enormous marketing budget behind the word itself so it sticks in people's heads the way "netbook" did a few years back (RIP netbooks, nobody is sad). I'll believe the ultrabook thing is real when the prices come down under a grand, but as a signal of where every PC maker's engineering time is going for 2012, it's worth paying attention to.
This is also, apparently, the last year Microsoft is doing a big keynote at CES, they announced a while back they're stepping away from it going forward. Which is sort of a fitting bookend, honestly. CES used to be a Windows PC show more than anything else, going back decades, and now it's phones and tablets and TVs with a side of PCs. Feels like the end of an era even before the keynote happens.
Quick unrelated complaint while I'm here: I still haven't gotten my Galaxy Nexus preorder situation sorted out and every time I read another glowing Ice Cream Sandwich review I get a little more annoyed at myself for not just buying one in November when I had the chance. That's on me, not on Verizon, for once.
Anyway. My actual prediction for next week, for whatever it's worth: a wall of Android tablets nobody asked for, at least one company demoing a curved TV like it's going to be in living rooms by summer (it will not), an obscene amount of ultrabook chatter, and one or two actually interesting things buried in a back hall that won't get real coverage until some blogger stumbles on them Wednesday afternoon after the big keynotes are done. That's usually where the good stuff is anyway, not the stage, the show floor, hall 3 or wherever, some Korean company's tenth booth from the end.
I'll be liveblogging what I can catch from here, time zones being what they are. If Siri could set my alarm for 5:45 without me having to yell at my phone twice I'd be thrilled, but that's a rant for another post.