CES 2023: all the news from the year’s biggest tech conference

The smart home at CES wasn’t all Matter, Matter, Matter. At The Verge, we covered the launch of literally dozens of new products at the big consumer tech show. From innovations in smart lighting and exciting products in smart home energy management to flying cameras and wirelessly charging smart locks, there was a lot of great new tech to see.

But there were a few that we didn’t highlight during the show, as well as a couple of genuine surprises we discovered roaming the show floor. Here’s a round-up of some of the other innovations, gadgets, and new products that caught our eye in Las Vegas. And in case you missed it, catch up on all our smart home coverage from the show floor here.

Every year at CES, you’ll see a lot of fascinating health tech concepts and prototypes — at-home urinary scanners, smartwatches that can noninvasively monitor blood sugar, and a wearable patch to prevent sexual dysfunction. And then, nothing ever seems to make it to market. Or if it does, it only happens years later, and often, the final product isn’t nearly as capable as the initial pitch. 

There are three letters why: FDA. 

Another CES has come and gone. And after spending a few days reflecting on what I saw at the big trade show, it’s clear that 2023 will be a relatively quiet year for TVs on the whole. There were no major breakthroughs or new standards demonstrated at the show — at least none that will make it into your living room this year.

Instead, we saw a lot of iterative, predictable evolution of current home theater tech. TCL and Hisense offered up Mini LED TVs with more dimming zones than we’ve ever seen. Samsung and LG are producing the most impressive OLED TVs yet. And nearly TV maker is talking up AI and deep learning gimmicks that cover everything from adding more depth to an image to rethinking the concept of picture modes.

Last week, AMD announced its upcoming Ryzen 7000 mobile CPUs and RDNA 3 laptop GPUs, and we got some very brief hands-on time with them. Well, okay — hands-on time is a stretch. I was able to play one specific title on one specific all-AMD system in the company’s demo area at CES 2023 last week. But that does at least confirm that these chips are real and functional in this year’s gaming laptops.

The company had a number of upcoming laptops from partners on display at the show, including some of the most anticipated models from Asus and Alienware that we covered over the course of last week. Most of them were running videos that showed off the laptops’ displays but did not clue us in about how the chips inside might perform.

From Central Hall to The Venetian, Matter was the buzzword throughout CES 2023 this year, with most companies even remotely connected to the smart home loudly discussing their Matter plans (although a few were more subdued). The new smart home standard was featured in several keynotes and displayed prominently in smart home device makers’ booths as well as in Google, Amazon, and Samsung’s big, showy displays. 

More importantly, dozens of companies and manufacturers announced specific plans. Several companies said they would update entire product lines, while others announced new ones, sometimes with actual dates and prices. And Matter controllers have become a major thing, with at least four brand-new ones debuting at CES. Interestingly, nearly all of them have a dual or triple function, helping banish the specter of seemingly pointless white hubs stuck in your router closet.

Our time at CES 2023 might be over, but it’s still worth highlighting some standouts at the show. One of those that’s gotten quite a bit of attention is from an upstart company called Displace. LG’s brand-new Signature OLED M eliminates every wire except for the power cord, but Displace is trying to nix that one, too. In Las Vegas, the company demonstrated a completely wireless 55-inch 4K OLED TV that runs off four hot-swappable batteries. This is a dream that has existed since the earliest days of The Verge.

Are we seeing an imperfect sneak peek of the future, or is this a solution in search of a problem? Is the Displace another classic example of CES vaporware? Will it actually ever ship? All I know for now is that it seems to make good on the everything-wireless concept — with one potentially pricey gamble.

The hits from CES 2023 just keep coming. Asus is rolling out a bevy of new hardware announcements for its ROG gaming brand, and among those are refreshed models of its Flow lineup. The Flow X13, X16, and Z13 are all getting hardware improvements, including the latest processors and mobile GPUs — but perhaps the most notable improvement with one of these gaming laptops is its larger battery.

Asus’ Flow line is relatively unique among gaming laptops, sporting 2-in-1 displays and — in the case of the X16 and Z13 — compatibility with an Asus-made external GPU to boost gaming performance. However, the most recent iterations of these laptops suffered from abysmal battery life, something Asus is trying to amend with the new models of the X13.

Alexa’s got some company. I met Disney’s new voice assistant at CES this week, and it’s pretty cute. Called “Disney’s Magical Companion,” the disembodied voice is born from fairy dust and lives inside Amazon’s Echo smart speakers and displays. Its purpose is to call up various characters — including Disney, Pixar, and Star Wars faves — to help you out with common voice assistant chores (timers, alarms, weather), as well as entertain with stories, games, and other sprinkles of Disney magic.

You conjure the assistant with the phrase “Hey Disney!” — here’s a quick demo I did at CES this week:

Another Consumer Electronics Show has come and (almost) gone, and The Verge was there to capture all of the biggest announcements, names, and gadgets shown this year in Las Vegas. As always, CES is an opportunity for companies to demonstrate how they envision the future of tech, and we wanted to break down some of the best things we saw on this year’s show floor.

Best monitor: Samsung Odyssey G95SC
CES is always a battle of the screens, and 2023 was no different. Samsung claims this 49-inch model is the world’s first 32:9 aspect ratio OLED gaming monitor. We don’t know the price tag yet, but the company says we can expect to see it later this year.

The first wirelessly powered smart deadbolt is launching later this year — but you’ll have to wait for the wireless power. The Alfred DB2S is the first DIY-installable smart lock that can charge via infrared power transmission, and Alfred says it’ll be available for $299 at The Home Depot, Lowe’s, and other retailers in early Q2.

There’s a slight catch, though: that $299 doesn’t get you wireless charging, at least not yet. For that, you’ll need a Wi-Charge charging kit, which won’t be available through consumer channels until the second half of 2023 at the earliest. Pricing for the kit has not been set.

When it wasn’t being overshadowed by covid resurgences, CES, for the past few years, has partially functioned as a big 5G pep rally. But as cars, smart home standards, and so many screens took center stage at this year’s show, 5G took a back seat.

Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg gave a very similar keynote speech in 2019 and 2021, showing off all of the things 5G would supposedly enable: remote surgery, self-driving cars, augmented reality, and so on. T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert was slated to deliver the 2022 keynote before omicron put a stop to that. But in 2023, 5G was hardly a footnote on the speaker roster.

Giant OLED TVs don’t belong on computer desks, despite what my colleague Sean Hollister thinks. A number of gamers use them as monitors since they deliver near-perfect picture quality at a similar price to high-end gaming monitors. It’s hard to blame them, but they’re putting up with lackluster stands, TV-focused interfaces, and having no DisplayPort, a staple for super-fast PC gaming. The pros might outweigh those cons for some, but it’d be great to get rid of most of those cons altogether. Thankfully, better alternatives now exist — a lot of them, actually.

At CES 2023, numerous companies announced models that use LG Display’s flat 27- and curved 45-inch OLED panels. They’re actual computer monitors, complete with sturdy, height-adjustable stands (with optional wall mounting) and all of the ports you’d need for proper PC gaming. They also have a 240Hz refresh rate and .03-millisecond response time. With this batch of panels, LG and Acer are each releasing similar 27- and 45-inch models, while Asus and Corsair riffed on these sizes with slightly more experimental designs. 

I’m generally a Windows user, but one of the things that’s always sorely tempted me about the Apple ecosystem is the interconnectedness. Not only are macOS and iOS comfortably similar in form and function (and getting more so every year), but there are so many easy ways to transfer content between a Mac and an iPhone. That’s why I enjoyed testing out Lenovo’s ThinkPhone by Motorola, which is supposed to be — and I never thought I’d be writing this phrase — the smartphone version of a ThinkPad.

The ThinkPhone has a Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chipset, a 6.6-inch OLED screen, a 5,000mAh battery, a bunch of fancy enterprise security features (a phrase ThinkPad enthusiasts will certainly be familiar with) and two rear cameras, including a 50-megapixel stabilized standard wide and a 13-megapixel ultrawide (plus a depth sensor). It’s MIL-STD 810H certified and IP68 rated for dust and water resistance. It ships with Android 13. But the coolest part, and the differentiating feature, in my opinion, is how much fun it is to use with a ThinkPad.

For the past few years, I’ve been a big fan of the LG Gram 17. It’s got great battery life, a massive screen, and it feels like it weighs basically nothing. But if there’s one hesitation I sometimes have about the line, it’s the aesthetic. The Grams of the past have just looked a bit... boring. Which is fine — many laptops are — but also means there’s a fashion-conscious audience out there they potentially aren’t reaching.

Enter the LG Gram Style. This, as the name implies, might be the first LG laptop I’ve ever seen that I’d really consider calling “stylish.” It’s unbelievably thin, it’s mind-blowingly light, and it’s covered in a lustrous color-changing finish. My hands-on time with this device was in LG’s very dimly lit booth at CES 2023, but it was certainly one of the most unique-looking laptops I’ve had the opportunity to try so far this year.

Okay, so. This is a pencil. You can draw with it on paper, the way you would with a pencil. Then, you can bring it up to your laptop screen and write on that, as you would with a stylus.

This MSI Pen 2, announced earlier this week, actually seems like such a no-brainer product when I think about it. If you have a notebook or Post-its on your desk where you like to write notes but also sometimes like to navigate your laptop’s screen with a stylus, you now only need one pen to do both. You could also try sketching out a picture, chart, or graph on paper before diving into doing so on a computer without putting down your writing utensil. You could take physical notes on a text that you’re reading on your computer, then also reach up and highlight parts of that text. I keep thinking of more scenarios where this could come in handy.