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…