This is a landmark event for this humble geek … this 2024 CES will mark my 25th year of attendance (including the 2021 Chinese-virus virtual show as well) to experience the newest, most cutting-edge tech that’s coming to the masses. Very probably, as usual, the public won’t see it all as some of these items just don’t work well (yet?) or is just out-of-touch with what really is happening around us. This will mark the first time I’ll be chronicling the introduction of tech from not just ten years ago, but twenty as well. The differences in the decade-long differential between the two is shocking. Upon reviewing my documents and such from 2004, there’s just so much I’ve forgotten … Hopefully, I can be forgiven as there were literally thousands of new items at the 2004 show, and each subsequent show over the next two decades. I realistically estimate for the last 25 years at CES, I’ve seen between 125,000 and 150,000 new pieces of tech … and walked approximately 700 miles as my pedometers tell me.
Should I get a bit of luck and locate “stuff” from the 2000 CES show, I’ll make a 25th anniversary posting as it was a absolutely overwhelming experience that let me gobsmacked for months trying to digest what I’d seen. For this geek … it was a seminal, life-changing event …
Now, jumping back to what is almost “tech-prehistorics” … 2004.
Notable “items” not listed in my 2004 ten-year anniversary posting from 2014, are these:
XM Radio and Sirius weren’t merged yet and they were really going at each other for clients. Sirius always had the best perks at the show. They had Joe Jackson and The Bangles at their booth for an hour or so each, among other artists. Sadly, they didn’t perform … why have famous musicians at your booth, in front of thousands of people, just to talk to them???
Samsung showed its newest and fanciest phone, the a690 … today a phone of this performance level is best suited to being a fishing weight or Christmas tree ornament as it didn’t even have Wi-Fi. But … it did have two-way SMS texting, as opposed to only receiving … so it WAS more than a fancier beeper.
The president of Intel said that the LCoS (sry, really technical description in the link) technology was the future of cheaper “flat screens” and projection TV’s …. The fact you probably aren’t even aware of this tech is indicative of how successful it was. But, we knew that at the show … and clearly, we should have probably told him … He kept touting a sub-$1800 flat screen using that tech for a 50” TV. We laughed at it, but, hey … he had free popcorn his booth and the Heineken happy hour at the GoPro booth was coming up shortly and I hadn’t eaten in over seven hours.
RCA showed a “super thin” LCD set … only about seven inches deep. One of my new LG OLED’s is around 3/8’s of an inch (9.5mm) thick.
HD radio was introduced and held such promise … but the radio industry blindly just waited too long and streaming has subsequently become the defacto standard in cars … personally, I haven’t listened to radio for more than twice a year for quite a while.
Sony, being Sony, introduced a 2.5 inch MiniDisk player for $399, that could play songs encoded with a proprietary and now forgotten codec called ATRAC, to stifle anyone from, GOD FORBID, from sharing a song. But hey, Sony at that time, thought that everyone would stampede to “Sony Connect” to pay 99 cents for an encrypted song that could only be played on a Sony device. Steve Jobs effectively put an end to that nonsense in 2007, saying people don’t want to “rent” music … when he uttered those words, you could hear Sony saying “s&%t!!!” … we’re screwed!
There were so many unrelated companies selling expensive flat-screens that didn’t actually make any … I wouldn’t have been shocked to see cheese companies selling a flat screen that offered the advantage of smelling like Cheddar. Hey … we all have dreams.
Other genius offerings were “Mailblocks” giving, for free to its users, fifteen MB of web email … or to put it simply by todays standards, two HD photos from a Samsung S23 Ultra phone. But, they’d triple storage for ten bucks a year … almost enough for less than half of a quality HD song recorded in the .OGG or .Flac format … or less than three seconds of a 4K movie.
PVRs (personal video recorders, now called DVRs) were crude, had low resolution and a few actually had modems that would call a toll-free number every night for a channel list and TV show details. Someone actually thought this was a good idea to have hundreds of thousands of these things calling a single phone number for a painfully slow data download … probably the same person that decided that there must be unlimited and totally incompatible versions of charging, video, storage and data cables for every device. Maybe an ex-Sony or Apple employee?
In 2014, things had begun to get more familiar to the folks of 2024 as a few technologies had a bit of time to mature. But … as I’ve stated in previous posts, even a single year can look totally different if something is a breakthrough … think the iPhone being introduced on the 9th of January, 2007 … the same time as CES, but (as is typical of Apple) not at the CES show. So, let’s leap a decade ahead to 2014 now.
Under the heading of “it seemed like a good idea at the time” … curved flat screens make an appearance … really cool for a single person to watch & really lousy for more than that, as the picture degrades precipitously if off-axis. This is the voice of experience talking here … I did a blog comparing the top-of-the-line curved Samsung vs. a LG OLED. It was a royal “PIA” hauling that Samsung back to Best Buy for a refund.
Roku announced it wanted to the defacto standard for streaming TV’s … I wish they had spoken to me as I couldn’t see ANY major companies paying royalties for something it could easily develop in-house. Now, they are only installed in what is considered the “bottom-of-the-line” sets.
LG released its new flagship OLED … a 77” spectacular showpiece for a lucky few. It was one of those pieces that if you have to ask “how much?”, you can’t afford it …
This was clearly the show for the move to 4k despite there being literally almost nothing to watch. The camcorder makers having primarily 1080 cameras, had almost nothing to display as they were focused on getting 4K camcorders developed for late 2014 or 2015.
Sharp displayed their “Quattron” TVs that had four colors (added a yellow pixel) other than the usual RGB arrangement … it looked brighter … here’s the “but” … it was still a LCD set. I don’t recall ever seeing it in a retail store after the introduction. I can only assume that people that have yellow as their favorite color may in the minority.
Phillips showed its TVs in 28”, 32”, 39”, 40”, 46”, 47”, 49”, 50”, 55”, 58”, and 65” sizes. Seems like there may have been no one actually in control in the TV development area at Phillips … sounds like the old saying “let’s throw it all at the wall and see what sticks.” I haven’t seen a Phillips TV in years, so I guess none of them stuck …
Whirlpool (yes, the washing machine company) showed a frig that had Bluetooth for playing music from your phone or computer. I consider this absolute proof you shouldn’t smoke weed and design refrigerators … regardless of how much you love your chilled munchies. The look on the Whirlpool guys’ faces was interesting when I shared that I didn’t think this was a good idea, and that the public was actually craving a dishwasher with Bluetooth instead … when I left, they were deep in thought as this IS a tech show, and Whirlpool only hires the best in audio for their appliances.
The 4K Blu-ray DVD players were finally being shown … when the last time you used a DVD player?
Digital cameras were really hitting their stride … while not impressive by today’s standard, they would still be entirely acceptable by today’s standards … of course providing you can still get batteries for it … and provided you don’t own a Sony, as the cost of very, very low capacity “Memory Sticks” are stupid expensive and primarily on eBay.
Digital watches were everywhere at this show and even today, the newest watches aren’t really much better. Maybe a faster processor and a minor feature or two more … but, that’s about it … shortly after that show I purchased a “smart watch” for $4.99 that will literally do almost anything that I would want new $799 Apple watch to do … AND looking cooler to boot!
I’ve got my guesses of what’s coming at the 2024 CES … However, I sincerely hope I’m completely wrong, and it’s as much of a surprise as my first CES show …