The holiday season has barely started, but some of us are already gearing up for CES 2025. Shortly after New Year’s Day, many Engadget team members will be packing their bags to fly to Las Vegas , where we’ll cover the biggest annual tech event. conference. As usual, our inboxes are already flooded with pitches from companies planning to be there, and our calendars are filling up with appointments for briefings and demos.
Based on our experience, as well as observing recent industry trends, it’s pretty easy to make an educated prediction about what we might see in January. Over the years, the conference has focused on areas such as televisions, cars, smart home products and personal health, with a handful of laptops and accessories. At CES 2025, we expect to see AI become even more pervasive across all domains. of the living room. But we’re also likely to get the usual round of new processors and subsequent laptops, plus all manner of wearables, trackers, bathroom appliances, and massage chairs. Oh, the massage chairs.
If you’re already looking ahead to 2025 and carefully researching what might happen in January, here’s a taste of what our team expects to see at the show.
New video cards from AMD and NVIDIA
There is no doubt that 2025 will be a pivotal year for PC gamers. NVIDIA is expected to show off its long-awaited RTX 5000 video cards at CES, while AMD CEO Lisa Su confirmed we’ll see Next-gen RDNA 4 GPU early next year. Of the two companies, AMD could use the upgrade more. It is latest batch of Radeon 7000 cards were decent mid-range performance, but they were far behind NVIDIA’s hardware when it came to ray tracing, and AMD’s FSR 3 upscaling couldn’t compete with the powered DLSS 3 either by NVIDIA AI.
“In addition to a big increase in gaming performance, RDNA 4 delivers significantly higher ray tracing performance and adds new AI capabilities,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said on a call with results in October.
As for NVIDIA’s new hardware, a rumor from the leaker A Raichu (via Digital trends) suggested that the RTX 5090 could be up to 70% faster than the RTX 4090. (This is a GPU I had previously used described as having “unholy power”.) They also note that other “high-tier” cards could see 30-40% performance improvements. These gains might be enough to entice wealthy RTX 4090 owners to upgrade, but RTX 4070 and 4080 owners may want to skip this generation. For NVIDIA holdouts with RTX 3000 and earlier GPUs, next year could be the perfect time to upgrade. — Devindra Hardawar, Senior Reporter
PC AI, round 2
Last year, I predicted that AI PCs would dominate CES, and that turned out to be largely true. As 2024 progressed, we saw even more powerful NPUs in Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm chips. Microsoft has also doubled down on its AI PC efforts with its Copilot+ initiativewhich gave a big marketing push to artificial intelligence features and high-end specs (like having at least 16GB of RAM).
Expect more of the same ahead of CES 2025, with even more AI integrated into every product category imaginable. This year in particular, PC makers should prepare to take advantage of Windows 10 support ends next year. Instead of just upgrading your old computer to Windows 11, Dell and HP prefer that you buy a brand new AI PC with the new operating system pre-installed.
While 2024 has been a year of endless AI PC hype, 2025 could end up being a year of reckoning. Microsoft’s long-delayed Callback feature is slowly expanding to more users, but it’s already showing glaring security flaws, like don’t erase social security and credit card numbers from screenshots. We have also been mostly disappointed with Apple Intelligence’s image generation capabilities. Until now, PC makers have been eager to talk up the potential of AI-based features, but in 2025, they’ll actually have to prove that they can live up to their fantastical claims. — DH
Headphones that follow Apple’s lead in hearing health
I am fully aware that not all audio companies have the capacity to develop clinical grade hearing test and hearing aid features in their applications. However, Apple’s recent update for the AirPods Pro 2 should prompt the competition to offer some form of hearing health tools on its flagship products. Jabra was probably best equipped to achieve this since parent company GN has extensive hearing aid experience. Unfortunately, the company announced earlier this year that it wouldn’t make any more headphones.
Samsung and Google could likely integrate something like what Apple did for AirPods, given both companies’ existing health platforms. If they did, it’s unlikely these announcements would be made at CES, as both companies prefer to hold their own standalone hardware events throughout the year.
This leaves Sennheiser as the largest audio company regularly launching headphones and earbuds at CES. Last year he presented several new modelsincluding one with heart rate monitoring for workouts. In addition, it already offers hearing assistance with dedicated devices like true wireless Clear conversation More. These headphones are more focused on hearing than general content consumption. So it would be great to see Sennheiser bring some features from this to their product. flagship range of Momentum headphones. Perhaps a Momentum True Wireless 4 Pro or Plus is in the cards, but the current model is only nine months old.
Of course, there’s plenty of room for other companies to innovate here, and there’ll be no shortage of new headphones in Vegas next month. We also tend to see a ton of assistive devices and technologies launch at CESfrom major accessibility companies like OrCam and all kinds of small 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, editor-in-chief
Vehicle electrification reaches new heights
As the growth of electric cars approaches 10 percent of new models sold In the United States, it’s easy to forget that wheeled vehicles aren’t the only type of transportation moving toward battery-powered propulsion. Flying taxis have been a mainstay at CES in recent years, with concept vehicles from brands as big as Hyundai dotting the Vegas show.
Certainly, these machines look more like giant drones with cockpits than anything the Jetsons ever imagined. But with companies like Archer Aviation And Joby Aviation By pledging to actually launch eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) services in 2025, the air taxi era may have truly landed this time around. — Sam Rutherford, senior reporter
Expanded dialog enhancement features on soundbars
When it comes to the main aspects of soundbars, there really isn’t a lot of innovation from year to year. Damn, Samsung’s biggest update last year was adding HDMI 2.1 support to its flagship model, which should have already been there. Companies have also focused on transitioning to a cable-free system, whether that’s Dolby Atmos or wireless Dolby Atmos. wireless transmission boxes. Audio enhancement features are one place where businesses can really rise above the fray, and tools like Sonos TV audio swap And Personal surround sound from Bose are excellent examples. One key area that almost every company can improve is dialogue enhancement, a feature that increases the volume or separates speech from background noise and music for better clarity.
Sonos has taken a big step forward in this regard the Ultra Arcoffering two additional settings for so-called speech enhancement. Previously, it was simply an all-or-nothing toggle, which is how most companies manage their versions of this tool. Not only is Sonos’ update customizable to a degree, it’s also just plain better, thanks in part to the redesigned architecture of its new premium soundbar. This is an obvious area where other companies can improve.
LG and Samsung typically announce new soundbars at CES, and many smaller companies will launch them as well. I’d like to see them all take the dialogue improvements further and, at the very least, provide several options for how they are applied. LG has been using AI Sound Pro on its TVs since 2021, and Samsung offers something called Adaptive Sound on its home theater speakers. I would expect them both to improve the quality of their features, but I hope they also expand their capabilities. — B.S.