An attendee rests on a couch during the CES tech show Thursday, Jan. 6, 2022, in Las Vegas. Photo / AP
After being online-only last year due to the pandemic, the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show went ahead as an in-person event, perhaps through a sense of desperation rather than purpose.
Lots of the big tech names pulled out of CES 2022 because of fears that it would turn into an Omicron super spreader event.
The saying in the past was that you would catch the "CES flu" at the giant event. With Omicron in the air, some big companies didn't feel they could make staff attend CES or worse, bring sickness to their workplaces which would wreak havoc with productivity.
Smaller companies, however, felt they had to attend CES however. On Christmas Day, the Consumer Technology Association's head Greg Shapiro said CES must go ahead, or smaller tech companies would be hurt as they couldn't showcase their products.
CES happened, but exhibitors competing for publicity might have been disappointed as journalists from the major tech outlets stayed away too, and attended the event virtually instead. According to an AP report, attendance was down 75 per cent on the 170,000 attracted in January 2020.
Virtual events can be okay, but it's fair to say that most of them just don't leave that lasting impression that attending in person does. Being able to be there to take in electric cars, bendable screens, robots, drones and to be appalled at the vast amount of weird and useless direct-to-landfill tech is a very different experience.
AMAZING! These warehouse #robots can climb shelves to retrieve inventory for #shipping
— Jim Harris #MWC22 (@JimHarris) January 6, 2022
Watch it grab a case of Corona beer towards end of video#CES2022 #CES @CES #robotics #robots #SupplyChain #tech #technology #innovation @Ronald_vanLoon @EvanKirstel pic.twitter.com/MOGrN3j3qX
"CES is still a great way to get the lay of the consumer electronics land all in one place, and I don't think there's any way to entirely replace it with an all-virtual experience," Harry McCracken, the global technology editor of United States business magazine Fast Company said.
One of the companies going virtual for this year's CES was the Chip Monster that kicked off personal computing, namely Intel.
Lately, Intel has been under siege by not just perennial chip rival AMD with its multi-core Ryzen processors, but also from Apple which decided to go with an in-house design that has turned out to be rather powerful yet energy efficient.
Losing Apple as a flagship customer was humiliating for Intel, which has now launched its 12th Gen Core processor range to show that it too can make quick and competitive chips.
It's all a bit esoteric, but the 12th gen chips feature multiple Performance and Efficiency cores or brains which is a new strategy from Intel, but which has been used by ARM makers like Qualcomm and Apple for a long while.
Gamers continue to be an important target market for Intel because they really pay attention to how much performance each new silicon iteration brings. And, gamers spend big, but expect frequent hardware refreshes, at least one each year, by vendors.
The new intel chips are still "only" made with 10 nanometre technology, whereas Samsung Taiwan Semiconductor foundries make finer 7 and 5 nm chips, and are moving towards 3 nm. A finer manufacturing process equals larger transistor density and lower power usage, but are difficult to achieve at scale as the yields of working chips cut from semiconductor wafers can be low.
Intel's briefing was interesting for the likes of yours truly, who try to understand how vendors can provide more computing power with less energy being used, and how hardware security issues are being dealt with, among other things.
At times though, the presentation turned into a slideshow with heaps of difficult-to-remember detail. One slide, in particular, had 26 abbreviations and acronyms on it, and yeah, what do ISH and HBR3 do again?
CES silliness is upon us.
— Chris Keall (@ChrisKeall) January 5, 2022
"BMW unveiled an e-ink vehicle exterior that can change colors depending on weather and traffic conditions, or just the driver's mood.
"In answer to your first question, no, this futuristic feature is nowhere near production ready." https://t.co/SqpPkEJkGT
One mysterious touch in the December briefing was the Zoom backgrounds being watermarked with journalists' email addresses. This was presumably to prevent screenshots being published ahead of CES on January 4, even though the chips had been announced in October 2021 already.
Which brings us to the missing bit: the lack of physical evidence. How well do the chips work in practice? Are the new chips really that much faster and use less energy? What about the computers they go into? Are they nicely designed, good to use and worthwhile upgrades?
Those are all questions that you could have answered at trade shows where you're allowed to touch stuff and try it out. Well, only to a degree perhaps, but virtual events are very much about controlled access to information. That and no physical experience makes them far less attractive compared to anarchic trade shows. From a planet-saving point of view, maybe that's not such a bad thing either.