back to article That subdued CES has us wondering what 2025 will look like, tech-wise

The annual Consumer Electronics Show was held this week in Las Vegas – and for us the extravaganza felt a bit subdued for a change. Could it be manufacturers have run out of ideas? Some recognition that buyers have run out of disposable income? Trump's tariff plans, which may drastically raise the cost of importing into …

  1. 3arn0wl

    The biggest question for 2025 is: What will Windows users do once Windows 10 is unsupported? And I don't think anyone has the complete answer to that. Sure, we all know the options... but what will people / companies / government departments &c do?

    1. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

      I have just been migrated from 10 to 11 at work and... the further dumbing down of everything is incredibly frustrating. Really not looking forward to making the "choice" at home either.

      However 11 has been less visually glitchy and laggy than 10 so far, so at least that's something? (but then so was 7...)

      1. Like a badger

        "I have just been migrated from 10 to 11 at work and... the further dumbing down of everything is incredibly frustrating. Really not looking forward to making the "choice" at home either."

        At home you at least have more control at home than with an enterprise machine. Stick on Open-Shell and a good deal of the nastiness of 11's UI can be mitigated, run O&O Shutup10++ and that'll plug some of the privacy holes.

        1. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

          Cheers. When the time comes I'm definitely going to be doing a lot of research and, I expect, using a lot of third party tools...

    2. Mike007 Silver badge

      Why would any functional company give a crap? Their suppliers have been shipping them windows 11 computers for ages... And the windows 10 computers they have will upgrade without issue for free.

      If you have hardware that can't run windows 11... how long ago was it meant to have been replaced according to company policy? (Our clients all have a 4 year policy, we refuse to waste time troubleshooting hardware older than that)

      1. H in The Hague

        "(Our clients all have a 4 year policy, we refuse to waste time troubleshooting hardware older than that)"

        Hmm, seems a bit wasteful. In NL you have to write investments in hardware off over 5 years (or more) for taxes. And the 5-year old laptop I'm writing this on is just as functional now as it was on day 1, not in a hurry to replace that.

        1. Mike007 Silver badge

          1 engineer putting in an entire day troubleshooting an issue only to have to replace it anyway most of the time is simply not cost effective. And such things rarely only involve 1 person.

          We didn't used to enforce the policy until the managing director queried a support ticket and discovered how much time was being wasted troubleshooting old laptops, and how frequently that effort resulted in a diagnosis of "buy them a new laptop, ship the old one to us"... Followed by the quote of almost the price of a new laptop to get it repaired, which we stopped even bothering with because nobody wants to pay half of the cost of a new laptop to get back an old one.

          I have probably been responsible for more than half of the "over 4 years old, write it off" declarations, even though I am a developer who only helps out with support when needed. If they get as far as asking me for help, they have already wasted too much time on it.

          1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

            We write off laptops as soon as the Dell warranty runs out.

            Means we have a stack of pretty nice laptops to 'repurpose'

    3. UnknownUnknown

      I think most will just ignore it.

      I have had some recent UK customers/Tier 1 retailers either just come off Windows XPe PoS/Server 2003’or PoSReady 7 or are still running it for < business critical> Remoteware Polling, Sales Audit - Both should be replaced soon - or customer facing InStore PoS.

      General strategies are to partition it, virtualise it or use whatever security/malware/AV software still supports- even if best efforts.

      Absolutely shocking.

  2. IGotOut Silver badge

    CES in summary

    Everything is branded AI, even if it's not,because we have no new ideas.

    1. mostly average
      Terminator

      Re: CES in summary

      And the AI is literally built upon recycled ideas.

    2. UCAP Silver badge

      Re: CES in summary

      The problem with AI is that it is all A with absolutely no I. Basically it's another South Sea Bubble that is bound to burst sooner or later.

      1. Like a badger

        Re: CES in summary

        Well if any fool has doubts that AI is a bubble that is about to burst, with bad outcomes:

        https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jan/12/mainlined-into-uks-veins-labour-announces-huge-public-rollout-of-ai

  3. Dr. G. Freeman

    I miss the coverage of CES on the BBC 'Click' program (The tesco-value version of Tomorrow's World).

    but they've cancelled Click now.

  4. Jan 0

    CES? We've heard of it.

    Isn't the Big One held in Berlin anymore?

  5. MonkeyJuice Bronze badge

    Two Grand for a Graphics Card?

    This is the thing- working with CG a lot means I am technically in the market for a 2 grand card- but while denoising an image is _a_ task in the pipeline, it is absolutely dwarfed by the meat and potatoes of actual path tracing. It's early days but so far, looking at the specs the value proposition is simply not there. I can't see a reasonable step increase in raw CUDA performance either, so I wonder if the science and engineering peeps don't feel the same way.

    I'm curious, do any of my fellow commentards have a real use case where the 5xxx series shines?

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