CES 2019: What we’ve seen, and are still seeing, at the biggest show in tech – The Verge

Wacom and Magic Leap are creating an optimistic vision of the future of productivity

2019-01-17T18:29:48-05:00

You've most likely seen some iteration of the image above before, in overreaching tech concept videos preaching the possibilities of the collaborative workspace of the future. It's easy to brush off these imaginings because they're still just photoshopped images depicting what seemed like a distant reality. But after having tried Wacom and Magic Leap's prototype collaborative design tools, I can say that these renderings are a pretty accurate representation of what I experienced.

The Wacom and Magic Leap partnership was first announced at the inaugural L.E.A.P. developers' conference held last October, at which the two companies showed a p …

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August CEO on the smart home of the future

2019-01-15T16:29:32-05:00

Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel chats with August CEO Jason Johnson about smart locks and the challenges of integrating various technologies within a smart home. They discuss whether every company needs to be a data collection company, and why it's so difficult to be a hardware company in tech.

1:00 August adds third-party door locks to its smart home platform

2:00 The biggest Apple HomeKit products from CES 2019

3:00 August's leaked smart doorbell actually looks like a doorbell this time

5:00 Smart homes got fancier this year at CES

For more updates and interviews from 2019's CES, check out The Vergecast feed.

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My best friend at CES was a Douchebag

2019-01-15T10:05:33-05:00

Douchebags The Backpack.

Today, I want to tell you about a really good bag with a really terrible name: Douchebags' $179 The Backpack. The product of a Swedish company that serves a side dish of sophomoric attitude with its bags, The Backpack is intended to be your do-everything, go-everywhere workhorse bag, and it succeeds at that lofty challenge with aplomb. I've used it for a month and a half now, including during the grueling week of CES events, and I have to declare this my favorite backpack yet. After a decade of Kata, Manfrotto, Peak Design, OnePlus, Waterfield, and assorted others, this is the bag that now most closely matches my personal and professional ne …

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These $15 earphones from TCL have no right to sound as good as they do

2019-01-14T08:22:13-05:00

TCL SOCL300 earphones. | Photo by Vlad Savov / The Verge

Here are some sensible prejudices I have about earphones: if they're dressed up in a frilly design or lustrous colors, if the only claim their packaging can make is "party for one," if they cost less than $20, and if their maker is a company that's never previously made headphones, I tend to assume they're going to be bad earphones. TCL's newly released SOCL earbuds tick every single one of these dubious boxes, and yet… they sound absolutely terrific.

The $14.99 SOCL300 come in a tiny cardboard package that could be mistaken for a packet of pills. They're so damn disposable, in fact, that TCL was giving them away to attendees of its CES key …

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Smart homes got fancier this year at CES

2019-01-12T12:00:09-05:00

The GE Kitchen Hub.

The smart home market is still up for grabs. Unlike PCs or phones, which, for the most part, are dominated by a few well-known names, smart home gadgets can come from wherever and whatever brand. As long as they perform functions you can't get from the big names, people will continue to flock to them.

You can stick with mainstream options like Philips Hue lights or a Nest thermostat, and there's nothing wrong with that. But the fun thing about building a smart home is that after choosing an ecosystem (like Alexa, Google, or Apple's HomeKit), you can mix and match a ton of products. At CES 2019, the variety only expands. Let's get into some …

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The best creator tools from CES 2019

2019-01-11T18:06:15-05:00

This year at CES, I noticed more of two things: portable, on-the-go tech that makes vlogging easier, and vloggers. There were gimbals and selfie sticks aplenty as people filmed themselves walking around on the show floor, making content for their own personal audiences.

Looking at the wealth of cameras, lighting rigs, and artist devices, they all seemed to be encouraging the notion that anyone can become a "creator" just by posting a video on YouTube, or creating art to be shared online. I know tools don't make the artist, but coming across these new products, I felt a stir of excitement and aspiration. "Should I become a YouTuber?" I asked …

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Daimler is beating Tesla to making semi-autonomous big rigs

2019-01-11T14:07:17-05:00

Elon Musk told the world in late 2017 that Tesla was taking its automotive know-how and applying it to a totally new challenge: self-driving big rigs. But one year later, he placed the Tesla Semi fourth on a list of priorities for the company, behind the upcoming Model Y compact SUV and an electric pickup truck. This week, Daimler executed a move many years in the making by announcing its own big rig (albeit diesel-powered) outfitted with semi-autonomous technology. And others are following suit.

The German automaker also committed to manufacturing the truck this summer, with deliveries scheduled for later this year. It pledged 500 million …

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The biggest TVs announced at CES 2019

2019-01-11T13:10:21-05:00

If there's one thing that can be relied upon to steal the show at CES year after year, it's TVs. The technology powering the biggest screens in our homes might not move as quickly as it does for smartphones or smart home gadgets, but their sheer size means that it's very impressive when it does.

CES 2019, like every CES for the past half a decade, has been filled with 8K TV announcements. New for this year are models that you'll actually be able to buy, but that doesn't mean you actually should. The amount of native 8K content out there is still frighteningly limited, and it's likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future unless someth …

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The Bocco Emo is a smart, playful way to keep in touch with your family

2019-01-11T11:27:08-05:00

The Bocco Emo has a funny name that might remind you more of your moody teen years, but there's actually a sneakily useful device behind its cute, simple design. It's a communication robot that relays voice and text messages to keep in touch with family members who don't have phones, and it connects via Bluetooth to toy block-like sensors that can monitor temperature, motion, and home activity.

The "Emo" part of its name comes from the robot's ability to "express empathy," as its makers describe it. When reacting to positive messages, its cheeks glow green, and it nods enthusiastically with happy chirping sounds. For negative messages conta …

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The biggest Apple HomeKit products from CES 2019

2019-01-11T10:00:12-05:00

Apple made a critical change to HomeKit two years ago. It started allowing products to join its smart home ecosystem just by adding some code, instead of requiring them to build in a special-purpose chip.

The effects of that change have been slow to appear, but we're finally starting to see them. The result is a lot more HomeKit products since it's now far easier for companies to build support into new products, and old products can be updated to add support, too.

At CES, we saw a number of new and old gadgets adding HomeKit support - from the usual suspects like Ikea and Honeywell to some exciting new faces like LG and Sony. Here are the …

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