Gadgetory

- CES is a show about a lot of things, cars, phones, trucks, Smart Home stuff, weird gadgets, and lots and lots of laptops. But this year, we're seeing a very different sort of lineup of laptops than we usually do, one that's more focused on subtle, more iterative changes than these big, sweeping upgrades that we're usually used to. Take Dell's XPS 13 laptop, for example. Last year's model, or the year before that, or the year before that, or the year before that, honestly, it was already a fantastic computer. And Dell did update it this year, but the biggest change was really small. All they did was move the camera from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen, and don't get me wrong, it's a notable and important change. It looked terrible at the bottom of the screen, you had this weird nostril shot, but no one's exactly calling this a giant, earth-shattering update. Or take Lenovo, whose updates were a new, fantastic screen for the Yoga S940, which, again, looks great, and new materials for the ThinkPad X1 models. They're not bad updates, don't get me wrong, but again, they're not big updates. Asus had new thin-bezel laptops, with bezels that are even thinner than the already razor-thin ones that they announced at IFA. They're so small, actually, that the company had to do a reverse notch on top to put a camera back on top of the screen. They look great, but it's again not a huge update, and compared to the ones at IFA, it's just not the same leap forward as when they first introduced the design. There's Samsung, which updated the Notebook 9 Pro with a new design, which it really badly needed. The old one wasn't great, and this feels much better, much crisper, and more professional. But on an internal parts perspective, it's still largely the same computer as last year's. Which, again, was a good computer, but it's a not a big leap. And there's HP, whose biggest laptop update this year was a new OLED screen version of its Spectre x360 laptop. It looks spectacular, especially when you look at it side-by-side with the old model, but if you have the old model on its own, there's really not such a reason to upgrade. And it speaks to a larger trend that we're gonna see throughout 2019, which is that our laptops right now are already really, really good, and that means that coming up with improvements or advancements going forward is gonna be a much harder, and much slower process. Part of the problem is technical, too. Right now, there just aren't really any new Intel chips to put in laptops, and without those processors, which will allow things like improved battery life or better performance, seeing these sort of big, monumental changes with the same tech that we already have now is gonna be a much slower and subtler process. All the factors that were leading to a slower development of mainstream laptops this year didn't really exist in the gaming PC side, so instead of not having new Intel chips, gaming PCs got brand new GPUs from Nvidia with its new mobile RTX line. And the overall lack of pressure in that field means that it's become a place for really cool, fun experimentation with wild and weird concepts coming out. Part of those updates have still been relatively ordinary. Some of them have just been simple spec boosts, where they're just taking advantage of these new GPUs, things like Asus's new Zephyrus X, or Acer's Predator Triton 500. They're thin, they're light, and they're gaming laptops that look and feel closer and closer to regular laptops, which is honestly great, but the real fun has come from the big, weird machines. Things like Asus' ROG Mothership, which is this massive 17 inch beast of a computer that's basically a Surface Pro that's been supersized and plays games really well. It's really a clever idea when you think about it, because instead of putting the laptop on the bottom and letting all that heat build up between the desk and the computer, Asus just turned everything on its side so heat can vent out the back. You have this nice, stand-up computer, and the keyboard even detaches, so you can use it just like you would a desktop keyboard, which, honestly, is kinda what most gamers want anyway. There's also things like Acer's Predator Triton 900, which is this wild two-in-one $4,000 monster of a gaming laptop, with this incredible 17 inch screen that has this hinge, and you can flip it around, you can twist it around, you can tilt it closer to your head, you can flip it backwards, you can just it use as a big screen, if you're playing a game with a controller. You can even convert it into a giant tablet if that's what you want to do. It's the sort of technology that we've seen on mainstream laptops for awhile, but when you apply it to this giant gaming laptop, it takes on a whole new spin. I mean, literally, a whole new spin. And of course there was what might be the most impressive laptop at the entire show, Alienware's Area 51m, which basically is a desktop computer that's just been shrunken down a bit and attached a screen and keyboard to. It takes desktop-class Intel chips, so if you have a gaming PC, you can literally rip the chip out of your computer and stick it in your laptop. It has removable GPUs, which is a concept we really haven't seen on gaming PCs in years, and maybe it'll work this time. Maybe it'll be like desktops, where, two, three years, you just buy the latest Nvidia or AMD card, screw it into your laptop, and suddenly you can play better games. It has just absolutely monstrous specs, 64 gigabytes of RAM, incredible screen, and Alienware actually made it look really good, which is great. And yeah, these big, ridiculous machines are just that. They're a little ridiculous, but that's not entirely the point, because the innovations that companies, the designs that companies are trying out, these, you know, fringe, multi-thousand dollar machines, will eventually make their way back to the more affordable gaming laptops and even regular mainstream computers. That's really where the interesting stuff's gonna happen over the course of the next year, and years to come. With all that said, don't write off 2019, either. There's still plenty of room for big jumps ahead in the laptop space. Intel has already started teasing both its ninth-generation chips for laptops, as well as the promise that those 10-nanometer Ice Lake chips will be out sometime this year. Additionally, the company also announced Project Athena, its new, Ultrabook-style design language that it's hoping to work with manufacturers to really drive that next leap forward for laptop design as a whole, and while details are still light on that, if it's anything like Intel's Ultrabook drive a few years back, we could be in for another really interesting, innovative, and progressive wave of revolutionary new laptops in the coming months and years. So, if CES is supposed to be this preview of what the biggest and best laptops of 2019 are, then, yeah, they're gonna look a whole lot like the laptops of 2018. But, considering how good those laptops are, a future that's just more of that sounds great to me. Thanks so much for watching, if you want more great content like this like and subscribe to The Verge on YouTube, it's all here.