CES 2024: all the TVs, laptops, smart home gear, and more from the show floor

Smart connected devices like lights, locks, shades, thermostats, robot vacuums, and security cameras can make your home more convenient, safer, and sometimes kind of fun. But even if you’re all in on connecting all the things in your home, there are two things that make the smart home a tough sell for a lot of households. You need your phone to control things 80 percent of the time, and getting all these devices to work together in smart home harmony through routines and automations is often confusing and complicated.

Thankfully, there’s finally some real momentum toward fixing these two challenges through more and better interfaces for smart home control and with smart uses of generative AI that make device automation as easy as typing what you want.

A 200-person startup named after Star Wars’ Princess Leia may have quietly cornered the market on glasses-free 2D to 3D screens — after clawing its way back from one of the biggest gadget flops of the past decade.

Remember the Red Hydrogen, the 3D phone that crashed and burned so hard its founder decided it was time to retire? Leia is the company that designed its “holographic” screen, and the company has been relatively quiet since that experience. Walking into its private hotel room suite at CES 2024 in Las Vegas, my expectations were not particularly high!

What if you could just... speak... to video game characters? Ask your own questions, with your own voice, instead of picking from preset phrases?

Last May, Nvidia and its partner Convai showed off a fairly unconvincing canned demo of such a system — but this January, I got to try a fully interactive version for myself at CES 2024. I walked away convinced we’ll inevitably see something like this in future games.

In the past few weeks, you’ve probably heard something about the Apple Watch getting banned. Something to do with a sensor, with some medical tech company accusing Apple of infringing on its patents. That medical tech company is Masimo, and it’s known within the medical community for its pulse oximetry technology, used for measuring blood oxygen levels.

The company would also like to be known for something else: its brand-new smartwatch, which features the tech that got the Apple Watch in trouble.

This year at CES was the year AI took over. From large language model-powered voice assistants in cars to the Rabbit R1, the technology you heard about everywhere was AI. It was a little too much.

It may be the year of AI at CES, but many of these “AI” features have been around for a while — it’s just that companies are only now embracing the branding of artificial intelligence. AI has entered the public consciousness: it’s cool and hip to place it front and center in a product, a sign that companies are ambitious and forward thinking. That’s led the term to be adopted wherever possible, even when it’s not strictly the AI most people know. 

We always look forward to CES. Not just because it kicks off the year, or because it brings nearly every major tech company under one roof, or because it means a flood of new products. We love it because of the surprises: every year, without fail, there is some strange and surprising new tech that captures our attention and makes us want to tell everyone, “come look at this.”

This year was no exception. AI took physical form, screens bent and disappeared, car platforms morphed. Even some of the more practical stuff — common standards and simple spec bumps — made a difference.

The Consumer Electronics Show brings thousands of visitors to Las Vegas every year to witness the latest innovations in tech — some practical and some jaw-dropping.

Our staff was on the ground, surrounded by thousands of smart rings, vacuums, concept cars, and everything in between. However, there were just a few standouts. The Verge highlighted our favorites from the show floor in the video above. Here are a couple sneak peeks of our top picks: 

Last year, you couldn’t mention CES without bringing up Matter. It was a pivotal year for the smart home standard, as big names like Samsung, GE, and Amazon promised better interoperability between their devices and a world of sensors, appliances, and accessories. But that promise largely started and ended with smart home tech.

This year, things were a little different at CES: the idea of making products work nicely across ecosystems bled into other areas of the showcase and rippled across a range of different devices — even putting rivals on the same page to better serve users.

OLED monitors have gotten faster than ever. While LCD monitors have been pushing 500Hz for around a year now, CES 2024 saw similarly excessive refresh rates arrive on their OLED siblings, with multiple monitors hitting speeds of 360 and 480Hz.

Whenever we’ve written about these monitors, commenters have quite fairly asked what the point of this all is. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time manufacturers have battled over specs with debatable benefit to customers, whether that’s the “megahertz myth” or megapixel wars of the ‘00s or, more recently, smartphone display resolution. 

The best gadgets at CES are the ones you’d never see coming. Not the iterative updates, where everything gets a little brighter and a little faster but nothing fundamentally changes. No, we like the E Ink toilets and the crab-walking cars and the rolling projectors that show you what’s inside your fridge. Do you need all these things? Does anyone? Will they ever go on sale? Who knows?! That’s the fun of CES.

On this episode of The Vergecast, recorded from the Kia Connected Home right in the middle of the Las Vegas Convention Center parking lot, we discuss all the most important gadget stories from this year’s show. We talk about the Rabbit R1, which was easily the surprise hit of the show. We discuss Ballie, Samsung’s adorable robot companion, and the tough week it had giving demos. We talk Qi2 and Wi-Fi 7 and the other standards shaping the future of gadgets. And finally, we talk about the future of cars, and what it means that the inside of the car suddenly seems to matter way more than the outside.

Every once in a while, you’ll turn a corner on the CES show floor and see crowds flocking around a high-tech sex toy. This year, the one that caught my eye was The Handy, an automated masturbator — mainly because it was moving in a way I don’t expect to see in polite company, let alone a public show floor. But right next to it was the Oh!, a $149.95 toy coming later this spring that had me also saying “Oh?”

Both sex toys are made by Norwegian sex tech company Ohdoki. The Handy, a motorized device that moves up and down to mimic masturbation for people with penises, is certainly the flashier of the two. At a glance, the Oh! is unassuming as far as vibrators go. What makes it different is how it vibrates.

Apple isn’t at CES, but it had a huge presence anyway. On Monday, just before a string of CES keynotes were set to kick off, the company announced that its Vision Pro headset would be launching on February 2nd. Apple had already promised that the headset would launch early this year. So the stage was set for its rivals to compete by making CES 2024 a showcase of new ideas about virtual and augmented reality.

Ultimately, that didn’t pan out. Lots of companies showed up with AR and VR tech. A lot of the headsets offered similar functionality to the Vision Pro, like an AR / VR monitor for your computer or a substitute TV. But none were as impressive a package as Apple’s headset, nor were most arriving nearly as soon.

For the past few years, the Oura Ring has been the most recognizable smart ring on the market. After what I saw on the CES show floor, it’s about to get some real competition.

The smart ring is a promising form factor, but it’s tricky to get right. It’s more discreet and comfortable for sleep tracking than a smartwatch. The underside of your finger is also a better place to take heart rate and blood oxygen readings than your wrist. The downside is that it’s challenging to create a device that’s stylish given how small and flexible the components need to be. Plus, they tend to be pricey, with fewer features than a smartwatch.

When I was a boy, I wanted a Ferrari Testarossa. As a teen, I’d have told you James Bond’s tricked-out Aston Martin DB5 would be my ride of choice. Today, I have a new answer: a Hyundai Ioniq 5 with magic wheels that turn sideways.

Because when you have four wheels that turn sideways, dear reader, tantalizing possibilities unfold.

The R1, the pocket-sized AI gadget from Rabbit that’s supposed to use your apps for you, has already sold out of its first batch — and its second batch, too.

In a Wednesday post on X (formerly Twitter), the startup Rabbit announced that it sold through its first 10,000-unit production run in just one day. “When we started building r1, we said internally that we’d be happy if we sold 500 devices on launch day,” Rabbit writes. “In 24 hours, we already beat that by 20x!” The first batch of preorders is expected to start shipping in March.

Year in and year out, most of the blood glucose tech you see at CES are devices that may not come out for years, if ever. That’s why it was refreshing to see Dexcom roll up to CES 2024 to talk about something a bit more tangible: its forthcoming Stelo continuous glucose monitor (CGM), a wearable sensor that provides a real-time look at your blood sugar levels. Unlike most CGMs, the Stelo is specifically designed to be an affordable option for Type 2 diabetics who don’t use insulin.

Unlike Type 1 diabetes, where a person produces little to no insulin, Type 2 diabetes is when, over time, the body either doesn’t produce enough insulin or the body becomes insulin resistant. Roughly 90 to 95 percent of all diagnosed diabetics have Type 2. However, if they control their glucose levels through oral medication rather than inject insulin, they usually don’t have access to CGM devices.