The new technology we expect and hope to see in Las Vegas

The holiday season has barely begun, but some of us are already gearing up for CES 2025. Shortly after New Year’s Day, many of the Engadget team will be packing our bags to fly to Las Vegas, where we’ll be covering technology’s biggest annual conference. As usual, our inboxes are already flooded with pitches from companies planning to be there, and our calendars are filling up with meetings for briefings and demos.

Based on our experience, as well as observations of the latest trends in the industry, it is quite easy to make educated predictions about what we might see in January. Over the years, the conference’s focus has spanned areas such as TVs, cars, smart home products and personal health, with quite a few laptops and accessories. At CES 2025, we expect AI to become even more pervasive in all areas of the show floor. But we’re also likely to get the usual slew of new processors and subsequent laptops, as well as all manner of wearables, trackers, bathroom appliances and massage chairs. Oh, the massage chairs.

If you’re already looking ahead to 2025 and scrutinizing what could be coming in January, here’s a taste of what our team expects to see at the show.

New graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA

There is no doubt that 2025 will be a significant year for PC gamers. NVIDIA is expected to debut its long-awaited RTX 5000 graphics cards at CES, while AMD CEO Lisa Su has confirmed that we’ll see next-generation RDNA 4 GPUs early next year. Of the two companies, AMD could use the upgrade more. Its last batch of Radeon 7000 cards were decent mid-rangers, but they were far behind NVIDIA’s hardware when it came to ray tracing, and AMD’s FSR 3 upscaling couldn’t compete with NVIDIA’s AI-powered DLSS 3 either.

“In addition to a strong increase in gaming performance, RDNA 4 delivers significantly higher ray-tracing performance and adds new AI features,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said in an October earnings call.

As for NVIDIA’s new hardware, a rumor from the leaker OneRaichu (via Digital trends) suggested that the RTX 5090 could be up to 70 percent faster than the RTX 4090. (It’s a GPU that I previously described as having “unholy power”.) They also note that other “high-end” cards can see a 30 to 40 percent performance bump. These gains may be enough to entice wealthy RTX 4090 owners to upgrade, but RTX 4070 and 4080 owners may want to skip this generation. For NVIDIA holdouts with RTX 3000 and earlier GPUs, however, next year could be the perfect time to upgrade. — Devindra Hardawar, Senior Reporter

AI computers round 2

Last year, I predicted that AI computing would dominate CES, and it turned out to be mostly correct. As 2024 rolled around, we saw even more powerful NPUs in chips from Intel, AMD and Qualcomm. Microsoft also doubled down on AI computers with its Copilot+ initiativewhich provided a major marketing success for artificial intelligence and premium specifications (such as having at least 16 GB of RAM).

Expect more of the same to enter CES 2025, along with even more AI being stuffed into every conceivable product category. This year in particular, PC manufacturers will likely be gearing up to take advantage Windows 10 support ends next year. Instead of just upgrading your old PC to Windows 11, the likes of Dell and HP would rather you buy a brand new AI PC with the new OS pre-installed.

While 2024 was a year of endless AI PC hype, 2025 could be a year of reckoning. Microsoft’s long-delayed rollback feature is slowly trickling out to more users, but it’s already showing some glaring security holes, like fails to scrub social security and credit card numbers from screenshots. We have been too mostly overwhelmed by Apple Intelligence’s image generation capabilities. PC makers have been eager to talk up the potential of AI-powered features until now, but by 2025 they’ll have to actually prove they can live up to their fantastical claims. — DH

Headphones that follow Apple’s lead when it comes to hearing health

I am fully aware that not all audio companies have the ability to expand a clinical quality hearing test and hearing aid functions in their apps. However, Apple’s latest update for the AirPods Pro 2 should inspire the competition to offer some sort of hearing health tool on its flagship products. Jabra was probably best equipped to do this because parent company GN has extensive experience with hearing aids. Unfortunately, the company announced it earlier this year it wouldn’t do headphones anymore.

Samsung and Google could probably integrate something similar to what Apple did for AirPods, given both companies’ existing health platforms. If they did, it’s unlikely these announcements will be made at CES, as both companies prefer to host their own standalone hardware events throughout the year.

That makes Sennheiser the biggest audio company to consistently launch headphones and earphones at CES. Last year it turned out several new modelsincluding one with heart rate tracking for exercise. In addition, it already offers hearing aids with dedicated devices as true wireless Conversation Clear Plus. These headphones are more aurally focused than for general content consumption, so it would be great to see Sennheiser bring some features from that product to their flagship Momentum headphones. Perhaps a Momentum True Wireless 4 Pro or Plus is in the cards, but the current model is only nine months old.

Of course, there’s plenty of room for other companies to innovate here, and there won’t be a shortage of new headphones in Vegas next month. We also tend to see lots of aids and technology are launched at CESfrom large accessibility companies such as OrCam and all sorts of smaller brands. I just hope that some of the new technology includes more general hearing aids on the models that most people will want to use. — Billy Steele, Senior Editor

Vehicle electrification is skyrocketing

As the growth of electric cars approaches 10 percent of new models sold in the US, it’s easy to forget that wheeled vehicles aren’t the only form of transportation seeing the transition to battery-powered propulsion. Flying taxis have been a mainstay of CES in recent years, with concept cars from such big brands as Hyundai dotted the Vegas showroom floor.

Granted, these devices look more like giant cockpit drones than anything the Jetsons ever dreamed of. But with companies like Archer Aviation and Joby Aviation promises to actually launch eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) services by 2025, the air taxi era may have landed for real this time. — Sam Rutherford, senior reporter

Expanded features for dialogue enhancement on soundbars

When it comes to the most important aspects of soundbars, there really isn’t a ton of innovation from year to year. Heck, Samsung’s biggest update last year was the addition of HDMI 2.1 support to its flagship model, which should have been there already. Companies have also focused on the transition to cable-free everything, whether it’s wireless Dolby Atmos or wireless transmission boxes. Audio enhancement features are one place where companies can really rise above the fray, and tools like Sonos TV Audio Swap and Bose’s personal surround sound are good examples of this. A key area that almost all companies can improve is dialogue amplification, a feature that raises the volume or separates spoken words from background noise and music for better clarity.

Sonos made a big step in this regard Arc Ultraoffers two additional settings for its so-called Speech Enhancement. Previously, this was just an all-or-nothing toggle, which is how most companies handle their versions of this tool. Not only is the Sonos update customizable to a degree, it’s also just better, thanks in part to the redesigned architecture of its new premium soundbar. This is an obvious area where other companies can improve.

LG and Samsung usually announce new soundbars at CES, and there are plenty of smaller companies that will be debuting some as well. I’d love to see them all take dialog enhancement a step further and at least provide multiple options for how it’s applied. LG has used AI Sound Pro from its TVs since 2021 and Samsung offers something called Adaptive Sound on its home theater speakers. I expect them both to generally improve the quality of their features, but I hope they will expand the features as well. — BS