PCMag was on the ground in Las Vegas this week scouring the CES floor for the latest tech and newest gear. While there’s been plenty of news, a handful of surprises, and plenty of delightful gimmicks, a few themes have emerged that paint a picture as the tech industry kicks off 2025. It looks like AI is here to stay, for instance, and so are smart laptops and much more. Here are some of the takeaways from CES that may define the rest of the year.
1. AI in Absolutely Everything
AI continues to be one of the hottest categories at CES. It was only last year that AI first burst into the consumer tech scene. Online chatbots have been widely available since 2023, and at CES 2024, we saw some of the first standalone AI hardware products like the Rabbit r1 pocket companion. Since then, some of the largest tech companies (Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) have deployed AI across their products in the form of improved personal assistants, built-in chatbots, and email-writing features. As evidenced by the announcements from CES 2025, AI is working its way even deeper into the tech products we may buy.
(Credit: Honda)
AI is coming for your car. Honda showed off its 0 Series EVs, a sedan and an SUV slated for production in 2026. These electric vehicles will feature a new AI chip that will play a role in powering Level 3 self-driving. AI is coming for your TV, too. Both LG and Samsung have agreed to bring Microsoft’s Copilot to their TVs, where it will help create personalized content recommendations. LG and Samsung claim adding the chatbot to their TVs will allow “users to efficiently find and organize complex information using contextual cues.”
Samsung isn’t stopping there. The company showed off Vision AI, which it will use to port the AI features of your Galaxy smartphone to your TV. You’ll get features like Click to Search and Live Translate, in addition to expanded smart home hub support and content recommendations. Let’s not forget your refrigerator. Samsung says Vision AI will find a home in its high-end smart fridges.
Qualcomm, too, has a vision for AI, but one that differs from LG and Samsung. The company hopes to use edge AI to handle more processing locally rather than in the cloud, which it says is faster and more secure. This will involve a chip made by Qualcomm and will appear in TVs and refrigerators first.
AI voice assistants are also headed to your favorite fitness gear. Withings showed off a prototype AI-powered smart mirror called Omnia. It includes sensors that can gather data about your weight and metabolism and work with companion smart devices like smartwatches and smart rings to provide a more complete picture of your health. It can then make fitness recommendations and even share the data with your healthcare provider.
Looking ahead, Nvidia unveiled Cosmos, an AI platform intended for cars and robots. Cosmos banks on the idea of adding training data to the models that support cars and robots. The expanded data may be able to help cars and robots make the decisions they’ll need to be capable of making in the years ahead.
2. Smart PCs Take Over
Lenovo Yoga Laptop Overview
If there was anything in big numbers at CES this year, it was fresh laptops, desktops, and more from PC makers—all chock full of the latest CPUs and GPUs to herald the full arrival of the AI PC. Acer, Alienware, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Razer, and others showed off a wide variety of machines for work and play.
Lenovo made a huge splash at CES, starting with a big update to its Yoga devices. The Yoga 9i Slim is the company’s top twisting laptop and you can be sure it’s a Copilot+ PC with all of Windows 11’s AU tools. The Yoga Book 9i is more affordable and drops Copilot.
Lenovo also had a new ThinkPad X9 Aura Edition, the ThinkCentre Neo 500q with a Snapdragon chip, as well as the screen-stretching ThinkBook Plus Gen 6, with a rollable display. While it may not run Windows, Lenovo was sure to bring its gaming gear, including the Legion Go gaming handheld with SteamOS.
(Credit: Joe Maldonado)
Acer went all-in on AI. Its two new Copilot+ PC laptops include the Swift Go 16 AI and Swift Go 14 AI. Acer says the AMD chipset inside will allow the two Swift machines to run more AI tasks locally rather than in the cloud and will still push through all-day battery life.
Razer is clearly gunning for Apple with its Razer Blade 16, which is significantly thinner than last year’s model. It is banking on the AMD Ryzen AI to power Copilot. HP showed off two new Omen gaming machines, as well as a gaming desktop.
By our count, at least half of the machines announced at CES support Copilot and are ready to bring AI to more people across a broader array of form factors and price points. PCs are prepped for the future.
3. Mobile Is Mostly MIA
CES used to be a great place to find new phones and tablets, but not this year. Aside from a few minor announcements, mobile phone makers and their products were largely absent from CES.
Budget phone maker TCL was one of the only companies to announce new devices. It gave us the 60 XE Nxtpaper 5G and the K32. The former is the more significant of the two, as it uses a Nxtpaper screen and can switch into Max Ink Mode, which allows for up to seven days of reading on the phone.
(Credit: TCL)
Samsung avoided making mobile news in Las Vegas, but it still has stuff in the works. Ahead of the show, it debuted their ultra-affordable Galaxy A16 5G. More importantly, it plans to announce its flagship Galaxy S25 at a Galaxy Unpacked event on Jan. 22. Apple is always a CES no-show, but somewhat surprisingly, Google had little mobile-related news to share.
We did get a couple of tablets, but nothing like the firehose of years past. TCL announced the Nxtpaper 11 Plus, an Android tablet that will be the first to use its Nxtpaper 4.0 tech. The latest iteration of Nxtpaper is notable for its adoption of AI to handle certain tasks.
(Credit: Lenovo)
Lenovo debuted a trio of tablets, however, and they don’t look half bad. The Yoga Tab Plus boasts a huge 12.7-inch screen, the Legion Tab is compact and focuses on gaming, while the Idea Tab Pro is an affordable model for the masses.
Though CES was a bust for exciting mobile products, we expect to see more at Mobile World Congress later this year.
4. Car Makers Hit the Brakes
There was a period of several years during which CES threatened to become a car show. That’s definitely not the case here in 2025. The bulk of carmakers—including Ford, GM, Kia, Mercedes, and Volvo—skipped the show. That’s not to say there wasn’t car-related tech news on hand, but it was limited to just a few companies.
Most significantly, Honda showed off its prototype 0 Series EVs. The 0 Series Saloon and 0 Series SUV are an important step for Honda. Its current EV, the Prologue, may be selling well, but it’s based on a shared battery platform with GM. The 0 Series EVs will be among the first from Honda to use its own battery platform. Moreover, the EVs will include heavy-duty processing powers for AI and Level 3 self-driving. The vehicles look futuristic, and prototypes often change significantly ahead of production, but Honda indicated that when the cars arrive in 2026, they will look largely like what we saw in Las Vegas.
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(Credit: Emily Forlini)
BMW was also on-site and previewed its dashboard of the future. Its Panoramic Drive UI, slated to appear in BMW’s future Neue Klasse platform, strongly mimics what we’re used to seeing on our smartphones. The UI includes three separate displays with a main display, a windshield-spanning info screen, and a heads-up display for the most critical details. Users will be able to customize the system to suit their needs and access BMW’s Intelligent Personal Assistant.
With little else to report, it’s clear that carmakers are busy working behind the scenes on their next-generation tech, which isn’t quite ready for the public to see.
5. Smart Glasses Begin to Grow Up
Smart glasses had a moment at CES. The nascent product category has moved forward in fits and starts over the last several years, but tech companies showed up with new wearables in force.
Captify showed off a novel product: Smart glasses that can generate closed captions and display them on-screen for you to read during a live conversation. These specs are intended for those who are hard of hearing. Dual beamforming microphones pick up the speech of the person standing directly in front of you and tamp down the background din. Your connected phone does the heavy lifting to transcribe the text, but the glasses have a tiny projector that displays the text in green text in front of your eye. Captify’s glasses can also translate speech between 40 different languages.
(Credit: Will Greenwald)
The Xreal One Pro smart glasses are meant to expand your workspace. You connect them to your laptop, and the glasses use a spatial computing chip to project your workspace on the lenses with a 120Hz refresh rate.
Halliday’s smart glasses are powered by AI and work in a way similar to Meta’s Ray-Bans. The display shows text-based information such as messaging, notifications, and translations.
Rokid has its own Ray-Ban wannabee with a pair of glasses that include a 12MP camera for first-person photo and video capture. The Rokid’s include a head-up feature with real-time mapping and testing, and an AI assistant is there to help.
These and other ideas from smart glass makers suggest a sharp future.
What’s Up Next?
With CES 2025 winding down, there’s plenty to look forward to in the coming weeks and months. We’ll have new phones from Samsung on Jan. 22, new gear from Leica on Jan. 14, and Microsoft has teased a major Surface business announcement for Jan. 30. And that’s just the first month of 2025!
Until then, take a look at PCMag’s Best of CES, see what CES tech you can buy right away, find out which smart home devices and smart glasses impressed us, plus the weirdest things we spotted in Las Vegas.
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About Eric Zeman
Managing Editor, Consumer Electronics
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