CES 2025 has begun, which means a whole fleet of new gadgets has been unleashed onto the world. As usual, team Engadget has battled jet lag, sleep deprivation and the static shocks of those horrible casino carpets to bring you all the news that's fit to print.
But if you're too busy to keep your browser locked on the site (or our handy dandy liveblog) then here's a recap. This may not be everything we covered, but it's a rundown of the biggest, most important and generally interesting news for your delectation.
There was a strong showing from the biggest names in the PC space, with Intel showing off its latest crop of Arrow Lake chips. These are AI and gaming-friendly slices of silicon that should pop up in PCs and laptops from major manufacturers in the next three months.
Speaking of which, Dell turned up to the show to announce it was killing off the bulk of its brands in favor of copying Apple's naming strategy. Rather than XPS, Inspiron and Latitude, you'll have Dell, Dell Pro and Dell Max — which in Sam and Devindra's minds, is a massive unforced error.
On AMD's side of the chip war, it announced the new Ryzen Z2, which will power
Apple plans to scale up its News app by adding new countries to the platform beyond the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, according to the Financial Times.
At CES 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang kicks off CES, the world's largest consumer electronics show, with a new RTX gaming chip, updates on its AI chip Grace Blackwell and its future plans to dig deeper into robotics and autonomous cars.
The original ROG Flow Z13 was always a bit of an odd machine. It felt like the strange lovechild between a Surface Pro and a traditional gaming laptop. But at CES 2025, ASUS is giving the tablet a much needed refresh that includes a massive performance boost thanks to the company's updated XG Mobile graphics dock.
One of the biggest departures from the previous model is that this time instead of relying on a CPU/GPU solution from Intel and NVIDIA, ASUS is going with an all-AMD configuration. The ROG Flow Z13 features up to a Ryzen AI Max 395 APU with unified memory that tops out at a whopping 128GB (though ASUS' spec sheet suggests it actually maxes out with 32GB of RAM). Also, by using a chip with an increased emphasis on power efficiency and combining that with a larger 70Whr battery (up from 56Whr), ASUS says the Z13 should deliver improved longevity of up to 10 hours on a charge. Meanwhile, the system remains rather svelte, weighing just 2.6 pounds and measuring just half an inch thick. This means it should be an excellent choice for portable gaming and productivity.
The Z13's screen is also pretty impressive, because even though it's not an OLED, its Nebula Display is powered by a vivid IPS panel with a 180Hz refresh rate, up to 500 nits of brightness and 100 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 spectrum. I also appreciate that even on a system this sleek, ASUS still found room for a full-size HDMI 2.1 jack in addition to two USB 4 ports, one USB-A, 3.5mm audio and even a microSD card reader.
Some other subtle updates include a redesigned keyboard with larger keycaps, a more durable PU leather cover and a much bigger touchpad. Inside, there's also a new steel vapor chamber that ASUS sa
While parent company Dell is doing a big rebrand of its entire PC portfolio, at CES 2025 Alienware is sort of returning to its roots by bringing back the classic Area-51 name back for its new flagship laptop line.
Available in 16- and 18-inch versions, the resurrected Area-51 gaming notebooks feature what Alienware is calling a brand-new industrial design. Though if you look closely, you can see some similarities to existing systems like the x14 and x16. Both models sport a striking anodized liquid teal paint job with an almost iridescent quality. Around back, the company's Aurora lighting has been integrated into the rear of the system to create a striking gradient effect on the laptop's thermal shelf. And as before, you still get plenty of customizable RGB lights on the inside including behind both the touchpad and keyboard.
But the Area-51 laptop's most distinctive feature might be its bottom, where Alienware has installed a Gorilla Glass window with an integrated vent to help manage airflow while also giving you a peek at the hardware inside. The company claims that thanks to its new thermal architecture, Area-51 laptops have 35 percent better airflow while being 15 percent quieter than before. There's also a new hinge design that's meant to hide exterior components while still allowing for easy access and stability.
Naturally, as Alienware's latest flagship gaming laptops, the new Area-51 notebooks should offer top-notch performance thanks to support for up to Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPUs, 64GB of RAM (at up to 7200 MT/s, the highest yet on
CES is known for putting the spotlight on wacky innovations and Eufy came prepared for this year's event. The company just revealed its E20 robot vacuum, which can actually transform from a traditional robovac to a manually-controlled stick vac. This is the first time we've seen something like this. Some robovacs include additional stick vacuums, but do not transform into them.
The design seems simple. On the outside, it looks similar to competing robot vacuums from companies like Roomba. However, users can simply remove the vacuum module, which includes a motor and a filtration system, and pop it onto a stick attachment. It also comes with a handheld vacuum attachment, which works in a similar way.
First, the chassis. This thing is almost a literal brick, at least in terms of size and weight, albeit a fashionable one. HP didn't provide me with dimensions at the presentation, but it's approximately the size of a two-drive NAS setup, or maybe one-third as small as the smallest Mini-ITX desktop I've seen. Much bigger than a typical "mini PC" sold to consumers, yet still a fraction of the size of a conventional desktop PC.
At CES 2025, Anker has a pair of new speakers under its Soundcore brand. The first, the Soundcore Rave 3S, is a $349 party speaker with AI-powered karaoke tricks and built-in light shows. Joining it is the SoundCore Boom 2 Pro, a more powerful follow-up to its non-Pro namesake, which adds boomier bass and better protection from water and dust.
The appropriately named Rave 3S is described as an "AI party speaker" with 200W output and 108dB volume. Anker says it can fill spaces of up to 1,076 square feet. Like some other Soundcore models, its RGB LEDs can create a light show that syncs with the beat of your music.
Red-shirt dude has perfected the art of couch-dancing.Anker
The Rave 3S includes a pair of wireless microphones for karaoke nights. That's where the AI comes in: The speaker has a vocal removal feature that can "turn any song into a karaoke track with just one click." If it works as advertised (we haven't tested it yet), it could save you the trouble of scouring YouTube or paying for a service like KaraFun to get de-voiced versions of your go-to jams.
It also includes a vocal enhancement feature, which adds clarity to your voice, and a reverb effect so you can sound like Phil Collins on your air-drum-ind
Anker's empire is vast, spanning everything from cheap batteries to 3D printers, but more importantly, it's varied. Case in point, the company is introducing the Anker Solix Solar Beach Umbrella at CES 2025, a flexible, freestanding shade structure that can also charge your phone or power the company's EverFrost 2 cooler.
Like a normal umbrella, the Solix Solar Beach Umbrella is portable, collapsible, and designed to protect you from rain (Anker's umbrella is specifically IP67 rated). What makes this solar beach umbrella unique from what you might have laying around in your garage are the flexible solar panels it has attached on top.
Anker
Anker says it's using perovskite solar cells in its panels, which are supposed to offer "30 percent better performance" than traditional crystalline silicon cells, and translates to a solar rated power of up to 80W. The company has offered few details about how the Solix Solar Beach Umbrella works beyond that, including how much it will actually cost when it launches, but it's not a completely unexpected extension of what Anker was already doing with solar.
Hyundai Motor envisions an interactive and partially virtual future it calls "metamobility," in which a variety of robotic devices interact with humans to provide a wide range of mobility services, from automated personal transport to remote control of robots in factories.
Hyundai executives, led by Chief Executive Euisun Chung, elaborated on the vision during a press conference at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday.
Buzzwords aside, Hyundai plans to leverage its growing expertise in robotics and artificial intelligence to build a future mobility network that connects humans in the real world with objects and tasks in the virtual world.
