Imagine a world where your home welcomes you by recognizing your voice, your TV adapts to your tastes and your car drives itself. A few years ago it was science fiction, today it almost feels like “already seen”, right? And yet we are only now entering a “mature” phase of these technologies, and the upcoming CES 2025 will make us take another, decisive step forward in this direction.
The world's leading consumer technology show raises the curtain on Tuesday, January 7, and raises it on a future where artificial intelligence permeates every aspect of our daily lives. Are you ready to discover how it will change the way we live, work, and play?
CES 2025, the biggest tech show of the year
A bit of San Remo, a bit of Super Bowl: at CES 2025, the biggest names in the industry gather in Las Vegas to announce new products and showcase some of the most exciting technologies coming out this year.
Traditionally a trade show for TVs, laptops, and home automation, it’s now becoming a major showcase for cars, wearables, wellness devices, and more. All of which, this year more than ever, come with one unmistakable prefix (or postfix): AI. Yes, the AI hype cycle continues in full swing in 2025, and AI will definitely make an appearance in the next generation of TVs and cars, whether you like it or not.
Here are the main trends we could see at CES 2025.
TV
I expect two main trends for TVs at CES 2025: screens will continue to get bigger and bigger and AI capabilities will be ubiquitous, to the point of being unavoidable.
Consumers have been trending toward larger TVs in recent years (75 inches and up, for that matter), so prepare to see some truly gigantic OLED and Mini LED models from Samsung, LG, TCL, Hisense, and more.
Smart home
CES 2025 will be the year of smart home gadgets. I expect a flurry of new product announcements from companies like Aqara, Nanoleaf, Tapo, Reolink, SwitchBot, Shelly, Lutron, Lifx, Flic, and Cync. I hope to see some real innovation, though: products that take the smart home to the next level, especially two years after the birth of Matter, a unified connectivity standard.
One area where I expect to see many new products with exciting features is in smart locks. With the launch of the new standard Aliro next year, this industry is ripe for disruption. Simpler and more direct ways to manage locks and security are a universal need that will also help bring the benefits of home automation to more people.
Cars
I think it's safe to say (and I could be wrong, of course, but I don't believe it) that this year's CES is shaping up to be the slowest transportation show ever. Most of the world's major automakers will be skipping the show, and most of the transportation announcements have already been made in some form.
That doesn't mean there won't be any exciting news, though. Honda is preparing to share more details about its range Honda Zero, previewing two new vehicles that are sure to satisfy our quota of sleek, aerodynamic sedans with sci-fi lighting patterns. That's it? Maybe, but let's wait.
Laptop
The Windows laptop space has seen a flurry of exciting changes over the past year, with Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm all releasing some excellent new CPUs throughout 2024. We’ll likely see a plethora of Intel Arrow Lake chips hit laptops (presumably at a good price) and a slew of new AMD offerings at the show, but the real story of CES will likely be all about graphics: the entire PC space looks set to explode with the expected launch of Nvidia’s next-generation GPUs.
We’ll continue to hear a lot of “AI for PC” chatter, and it probably won’t lead to much beyond automatically generated work emails and chatbots that ebb and flow. Sure, live translations are cool, but the most interesting AI stuff coming to laptops at CES 2025 will probably be what Nvidia has in store for its next-gen DLSS. Want to bet?
Gaming
It’s going to be a big year for PC gaming at CES 2025. One of the biggest announcements at the show will be next-generation GPUs from Nvidia and AMD. We expect Nvidia to unveil its RTX 50-series graphics cards at a special GeForce keynote on January 7.
AMD expected to announce its new RDNA 4 GPUs too: the leaks here and there online suggest the expected “appearance” of the Radeon RX 9070 XT, but it's more likely to compete with Nvidia's current RTX 4080 than the upcoming RTX 5080. The RX 9070 XT could also launch alongside FSR 4, AMD's latest upscaling technology that's expected to be fully AI-based to more closely compete with Nvidia's DLSS.
Smartphones at CES 2025, take out the phones
This year’s CES will be less of a phone show than a “non-phone” show: devices that let you do things you’d normally do on a phone screen, but without a phone. Glasses with cameras, gadgets without screens, that sort of thing.
That wouldn’t be bad, right? A “return to the past,” if you will, in dividing up again functions that have “accumulated” over the years into a single object. We can have other gadgets for when we don’t want the phone: a compact camera, a small e-ink tablet that runs all the favorite reading apps, a silicone case that turns the Apple Watch into an iPod. They won’t completely replace the phone, but they will expand the range of possibilities.
Wearable
It looks like smartwatches will take a backseat to more niche wearables this year too. I'm sure we'll see some smart rings updated, but I think smart glasses, AR headsets and AI wearables will dominate the show. Nothing on the scale Ray-Ban Meta, Rabbit o Humane, however: think of smaller, established companies in the sector showing what's new and brave startups eager to push the boundaries.
In any case, smart glasses and AI wearables have gained real momentum in 2024, and this will likely be reflected at CES 2025.
CES 2025, shall we turn it on?
From artificial intelligence that permeates every device to increasingly larger and more defined TV screens, through hyper-connected homes, self-driving cars and innovative wearables.
For a few days, Las Vegas will be the world capital of innovation, ready to amaze us with revolutionary products and futuristic visions. A concentration of new things to discover that will redefine the way we live, work and have fun. So all that remains is to wait with trepidation for the opening of the gates of CES 2025, and immerse ourselves in a world that will project us into tomorrow.
Futuro Prossimo, as a good “anarchic” site about the future, will not differentiate between the institutional “newsletters” of big brands and those that have just been born. The only criterion will be: is it fun or not? So expect updates that are right, sometimes bizarre, never excessive and never “paper-pusher-like”. For all other things, follow more “packaged” sites.
We will be here, however, from January 7th. Ready to go?
