CES 2015 is where 4K stops being the ceiling and becomes the floor. Every serious TV is 4K now, so the makers reach for the next gimmick, and this year it is curved screens, which look striking under the show lights and slightly pointless in an actual living room.
The car becomes the headline
The exciting stuff is automotive. Nvidia leans hard into the car with its Drive platform, pitching the GPU as the brain of a self-driving future, and autonomous demos are suddenly everywhere. Qualcomm ships the Snapdragon 810 for the year’s flagships, and the smart home pitch is on every booth, even though almost nobody’s house actually works that way yet.
The trend for the year ahead
The connected home and the autonomous car move from science fiction to roadmap. The chip companies have figured out that the car is the next giant computer, and they are racing to power it.
Curved TVs are a solution to a problem nobody has. The car story is the real one. When Nvidia and Qualcomm start talking this seriously about driving, you pay attention, because that is where the next decade of silicon money is heading.
Part of 20 Years of CES Through My Lens, my year-by-year diary of the show.