Coming back to CES after a decade-long break was a trip

Twelve years ago, I could have told you exactly what happened at my first CES and what happened at my third. Each was a chapter with a beginning, middle, and end; the lines between them drawn clearly. But now, 15 years since I attended my first CES, it’s a lot fuzzier. I know I missed my flight home at that first show. I know I saw a lot of cameras at first, and then progressively fewer cameras over the years. I know there were team dinners and early meetings, but I couldn’t tell you what happened when. 

What I do know about my first CESes is that I had — and I cannot stress this enough — no clue what I was doing. The same went for CES two, three, and four, to varying degrees. I think I had a Pentax DSLR loaned to me by a colleague. I had a work-issued BlackBerry and, I’m pretty sure, insisted on wearing nice dresses and impractical shoes to evening events. There was no Uber at the beginning, and you could spend an hour waiting in a cab line at the airport. We stayed at the MGM Grand, which housed live lions at the time.

I broke an 11-year streak of not going to CES this year, which gave me a rare opportunity. It’s not often in life that we get to step back and see something that has become routine with fresh eyes. But that’s more or less been my assignment at CES 2025. There’s not much for me here on the smartphone beat, so my job is to just walk the show floor, find cool stuff, and put it on the site. I’ve taken this remit extremely seriously by scheduling very few meetings, loading The Verge’s CMS on my phone’s browser, and wearing sensible shoes for the miles of walking I will embark on.

The journey starts on day one in the West Hall. There’s a Dunkin’ with a line that moves quickly, plenty of seating, and electrical outlets built into the booths. None of it tracks with my memories of deteriorating seating areas so small and crowded I frequently ate lunch sitting on the floor. Later, I realized that’s because this entire hall just wasn’t there the last time I was at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). I tell myself I’ll do a quick lap around the place and then head to Central Hall to see the big booths, but then I spot them: Big Tractors.

They’re enormous, and only some of them are tractors. The first one I spotted is an autonomous, articulated dump truck, a John Deere representative informs me. I have no real reason to be here, but it is cool as hell. Forty minutes later, I have pictures of myself in front of all the tractors, a garbage truck, and an electric fire truck. I wind up right back where I started an hour later and head toward the Central Hall searching for robots.

CES always has A Thing. I remember the days of sitting through demos of 3D TVs. This year, it’s robots: both the hardware kind and the ones embedded in software. Robots picking up socks, walking up stairs, offering companionship, or just being cute lil guys. And of course, robots in the form of AI. Everything has AI in it, from TVs to glasses, whether it has any business being there or not.

Robots aren’t new to CES, of course, but this crop seems capable of actually doing things for us, though reliability varies. I watched one small, adorable robot dive off a table unexpectedly as it dashed toward my colleague. “It’s durable,” the robot’s handler said as she picked it up and set it back on its perch. I don’t think we have anything to fear from the current crop of robots, you know, overlord-wise.

Getting around Las Vegas during the show — the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) says about 140,000 people are attending this year — remains a major obstacle. A decade’s worth of transportation innovation has done nothing to improve the situation. I still find myself walking between venues to avoid the gridlock on the streets and in the rideshare pickup zones.

At one point, I climb into a Tesla with two other attendees and descend into the Vegas Loop. It feels like a short, slightly futuristic Uber ride and saves me a long walk between the West and Central halls. Cool, I guess? But there’s still no good way to get from the LVCC to The Venetian, and I sit on a bus that creeps forward for 15 minutes through a half dozen traffic light cycles waiting to make one last left turn into the expo drop-off.

Outside of the convention center, I take in the ways that Vegas has changed — and not — over the last decade. Tourists still line the banks of the gondola route through The Venetian as the gondolier’s voice echoes in a slightly mournful tone, reverberating from a Banana Republic storefront. There are still men standing along the street handing out cards for seedy entertainment, slapping the pieces of paper to get your attention.

A woman standing at the front desk outside of a restaurant exclaims, “Allison! Is that you?” as I hustle by on my way to an appointment. I fell for that tactic one or two times in previous years, but I know enough now to remember that she’s just read the name on my badge and I don’t break my stride. In Vegas, your attention is a currency that’s second only to actual currency.

There’s one new fixture on the strip that’s impossible to ignore: the Sphere. One of my meetings in a hotel suite overlooking the Sphere comes to a halt so we can watch an animation of what looks like an alien breaking the glass and climbing out of it. The biggest item on my agenda on day two of the show is Delta’s keynote at the Sphere (it’s Sphere, not the Sphere, Delta’s media communications remind us). This isn’t the first time it’s been used as a CES venue, but it is the first keynote presentation in the space.

And the keynote is quite the show. Delta uses the Sphere’s massive interior screen and other experiential effects in all the ways you’d imagine. A plane rolls toward the audience, and as it turns to taxi, a wind whips up as if from the jet’s engines. The simulated plane lands later and our seats rumble to mimic the impact of touching down on the runway. At one point, a syrupy sweet smell is pumped into the space, revealed to be hazelnut coffee, as delivered by an Uber Eats driver on a moped. Tom Brady made an appearance that I didn’t understand, but overall, it promised a spectacle and delivered.

Toward the end of the presentation, the lights dim and the screen shows an image of the Earth as a giant, floating glass ball, rotating in front of stained glass. The light seems to catch and reflect in the three-dimensional object, and even though I know I am looking at an illusion on a flat screen, my brain is convinced that there’s a giant, floating orb in front of me. Even watching it back in my recorded videos, I can’t believe it’s not there. It took 15 years, but I guess I finally got a great 3D demo at CES.

What struck me more than anything at this CES was the very show-ness of it all. I know it’s a show. We all call it a show. We say stuff like, “Have a great show!” to each other when we’re here. After years of attending, CES can feel like an assignment, a series of to-dos as long as the Las Vegas Strip that you cross off one by one, step by step. But above all, it’s a show. There are no acrobatics or stunts, yet it’s still supposed to make us feel something.

Like a good show on the Strip, there’s some sleight of hand involved. Someone behind the scenes controlling the “autonomous” robot. The concept car that never ships. The giant glass ball that’s just an array of precisely arranged pixels on a curved screen. Like any other show, there’s a beginning, middle, and end — whether or not we remember them.

The details of this year’s CES will probably fade over time like all the rest have, but I’ll remember the feeling of it for much longer. And even for someone who’s seen plenty of CESes come and go, it turns out you can still feel a little sense of wonder after all. But I’m not holding my breath about any of those concept cars shipping.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge