- CES 2021 is over.

CES 2020 was also virtual.

Now, a virtual thing is not technically real.

So if it was never real in the first place,

can it actually be over?

Yes, CES 2021 is over.

And because it was virtual,

we were expecting it to be a pretty slow show

but it turns out there were some really interesting trends

and things that happened this year.

Now, CES is not a show where you should expect

there to be huge flagship announcements,

of products that you can go out and buy right away.

That's just not what the show is.

It's a show about the parts of gadgets

like the screens and the processors.

It's a lot of promises basically.

And that doesn't mean that it's vaporware,

but it does mean that what you learn from CES

is about the trends and things that are going to happen

a little bit later,

not things that you can go out and buy right now.

But that said, I do think that some of those trends

are really interesting.

And so I wanna talk about a few of those promises.

The first big trend of CES is the same trend as every CES,

and that there are a lot of concept devices.

These are things that might not necessarily get made

but that doesn't mean that they're vaporware.

It means that some companies have produced some things

that are really interesting

and that might turn into products

or might tell you what a future product

is going to look like.

And the concept that ran away with the show

was Razor's Project Hazel.

It has an N95 rating or at least it's supposed to,

if it ever gets certified.

It uses little gaskets to breathe

but there will be filters on them.

It's clear so that people can see you speaking,

which is really interesting.

It has a silicon thing over your nose

so hopefully it won't fog up glasses.

It also has a microphone

and a speaker that razor says it's working with THX to tune

so that your voice doesn't sound muffled when

you're wearing the mask.

That it sounds natural.

Of course it's rechargeable.

Of course it comes in a case

with a UV light to disinfect it or whatever.

And of course, because it's Razor,

it's gonna have RGB lights that you can set

to do all sorts of fancy color things.

This is a cool idea.

I don't know if they're actually gonna make it.

And it's part of another trend

that I just wanna mention on the side,

which is there were a lot of COVID gadgets this year

and I was very, very nervous going into CES

that what we were going to see is,

we'll call it COVID profiteering,

a bunch of gadgets that don't actually help anybody,

that are very scientifically unsound,

that are just taking advantage

of people's fear of this pandemic.

Luckily, it wasn't as bad as I thought.

We have seen a few things

like thermometers built into doorbells

that I don't think are very useful because the science,

external thermometers like that, isn't very good.

We also saw a bunch of UV gadgets to disinfect stuff

and that's fine, but overall, companies were relatively good

about not taking advantage of people's fear of the pandemic.

I don't think Razor did either but I will tell you

that the problem that we have with the pandemic right now,

isn't enough smart tech.

The problem is that people aren't being smart themselves.

They're not wearing masks,

they're not social distancing, not as much as we need.

So please do that.

And Razor as cool as this Project Hazel thing is,

I am more impressed with the fact

that you switched one of your factories over to making masks

for healthcare workers

and that you gave away a million of them.

Thank you for doing that.

And if you decide you actually wanna produce

this Project Hazel smart mask,

yeah, I'll take some flaky lights on my face, why not?

We saw a bunch of other regular kind of CES concepts.

Of course we saw concept cars

and we also saw a bunch of concept screens.

Like for example, LG has a semi-transparent screen

which is a very good idea.

They're showing it off again

that's even more transparent than before,

but for some reason they think you're gonna wanna put it

at the foot of your bed and have it rise up on a motor.

Sure, why not?

The main thing that we see with concept screens

is that they bend and fold.

And so TCL, which is trying really hard to prove

that it's a big deal now,

showed off a bunch of different bendy screens

that showed up off thing that was like literally a scroll.

Maybe someday, I don't know.

The rolly screen that I'm most impressed with

is LG's rollable phone.

It's a phone where it sort of rolls out

to become a tablet-size thing

or rolls back into the regular form factor that you expect.

It is just a concept but LG says

they are going to sell one this year.

LG also makes the Wing though

so they're probably not gonna sell that many of them

but just getting one out the door will be interesting.

I want a phone that turns into a tablet

and a foldable is one way to do it

and a rollable is a really interesting, different way.

(gentle music)

The next big thing that happened at CES

has to do with processors and laptops.

So let's talk about processors and laptops.

We had keynote presentations from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia.

And you put all them together,

what I think you're going to get are gaming laptops in 2021

that are very, very interesting and very good, I hope.

So Intel, it has a bunch of new core chips

and you probably know by now

that Intel has had a rough go of it lately.

They had to sell off their modem business to Apple.

They're competing with Apple, with Apple's new M1 chip

which is very good in terms of performance per watt

and Intel is having a hard time getting down

to the 10 and seven nanometer process for making its chips

which we know are more power efficient

or more powerful per watt.

Anyway, Intel, they're doing their best

with kind of what they got.

They do have some interesting things coming

but we will have to see

if they are like significantly better

or if we're still playing the waiting game with them.

Then there's AMD, which has another generation

of its Ryzen processors

running on the seven nanometer process,

which means that they can be very powerful

without completely destroying your battery.

I'm very interested to see what these are like

and I'm also kind of hoping

that they're actually easier to find

'cause they weren't in a ton of laptops last year

but the ones that they were in were very, very good.

Finally, there is Nvidia, which is bringing down some GPU's

to gaming laptops that are actually more powerful

than I would have guessed as early as they're coming.

I want to figure out to take it a little bit longer

for this much power to come to gaming laptops.

And by this much power what I mean is,

proper 1440P resolutions running at 90 frames per second.

That seems like it's completely a doable thing

on gaming laptops this year in form factors

that aren't like three inches thick and weigh eight pounds.

Now, after all these announcements were made,

there were a ton of laptop announcements

because all those parts were public

and so all the companies are making laptop talks

about all of those parts.

We're interested in a bunch of them

but the one that I'm most interested in

is the successor to this guy right here,

the Republic of Gamers, Zephyrus G14 or whatever.

If there's a G15, that's gonna use this design

and it's gonna have, I hope really, really good performance.

And I think it's gonna be

one of our favorite laptops of 2021 if it pans out

because this guy right here

was one of our favorite laptops of 2020.

Now, if you're not interested in gaming laptops,

what is all this chip and gaming laptop stuff

actually mean to you?

Well, watch Intel.

See, on the one front they're fighting Apple,

which has its ARM chips on its laptops,

Qualcomm is trying to make a thing with ARM and Windows,

we'll see how that goes,

and AMD is hard-charging on the x86 side,

Intel sort of stuck in the middle, trying to make it work.

And they have a new chip that's called Alder Lake

that sort of takes some of the ideas from ARM

in terms of a big powerful processor

and a little high efficient cores

to improve battery life and just sort of improve

overall performance on a laptop.

And that is gonna be their big chance to try and take on

the M1 chip with head-to-head performance.

We shall see, but that is the best bet

that they've got for 2021

and I'll be very, very interested to see

what ultra-light laptops with that chip look like.

And if they can be competitive

with what's coming from Apple.

(gentle music)

If you know anything about CES,

you know that what it really is deep down in its heart

and its soul, what it truly wants to be is a TV show.

And so of course, we got a bunch of TV announcements.

We got TV announcements before CES

even technically began because it was trying

to get out ahead of it.

And this year, the thing for you to remember

if you're not buying a high-end TV,

if you're just buying a TV is make sure you get one

with HTMI 2.1.

It's pretty much everywhere

but it's pretty much the best way for you to be sure

that you're gonna be at least a little bit future-proof.

Now, you're gonna have to check a whole bunch of specs

to make sure it can support all of the stuff

that you might want from a PS5 or an Xbox Series X

if you're getting one of those

or if you're lucky to have already bought one,

but at the very least, HDMI 2.1 is a start.

Now, in terms of high-end TV technology,

the big story here is mini-LED versus OLED.

You might know that OLED TVs are really good

because they can have truly black blacks

and then bright whites.

You get a high contrast ratio.

They look amazing and LG is the king of making OLED TVs.

But there's a competing technology.

It is mini-LED and what it tries to do is have the light

that shines behind the pixels be ever, ever smaller

so there's more dimming zones

so that it can get true black as well.

The advantage to mini-LED is that it's not organic

which means that it should last longer

and there's fewer banning concerns.

The disadvantage is they have to do a lot of work

to get those mini-LEDs more and more mini

so that they can get closer to the true black