Some future gadgets I'd maybe buy (aka a realist's guide to CES)
Eight Wirecutter writers and I convened at the Consumer Electronics show this week. You know, CES-The big gadget trade thing that serves as a sneak peek into the future of hardware. Instead of soaking your news feed …
Context & Ripple Effects
A year after The Verge asked whether there were simply too many gadget choices, Wirecutter's answer is organizational rather than editorial: eight writers deployed to CES at once, tasked not with filing announcements but with narrowing them into a shortlist of things actually worth buying. The backdrop matters — CES had already drawn record exhibitor and crowd counts as far back as 2006, and a 2008 column had denounced the show as everything wrong with the industry, so filtering has been the obvious unmet need for years.
The story also lands in an unusually saturated moment: the same week's coverage spans The Verge's CES awards, Quartz on sensors migrating to every appendage, plus roundups from AllThingsD, Ars Technica, VentureBeat, Boing Boing and SplatF. When every outlet files from the same floor, the differentiator is judgment, and this piece is Wirecutter staking that position explicitly.
First-order effects
- Wirecutter converts its eight-person CES presence into a direct competitor for post-show reader attention, going head-to-head with The Verge's awards and Ars Technica's roundup for the same 'what should I actually buy' query.
- Readers get a pre-filtered buying list instead of a news feed, shifting the unit of CES coverage from the announcement to the recommendation.
Second-order effects
- Rival outlets face pressure to answer the same curation question — award lists and best-of roundups from The Verge, AllThingsD and Ars Technica become the format CES coverage converges on rather than one option among many.
- Exhibitors gain a new target: getting onto a small trusted shortlist now outweighs raw booth traffic, raising the premium on pre-show briefings like CES Unveiled and hands-on access for review teams.
Third-order effects
- If buyer-side curation keeps winning, trade shows get judged by what ships and sells rather than what demos — a quiet rebuttal to both the 2008 'bloated show' critique and the optimistic framing of earlier previews like VentureBeat's 2008 CES outlook.
- Review publishers consolidate authority as gatekeepers between manufacturer launches and purchase decisions, a structural role that shapes how hardware categories rise and fade regardless of which individual gadget wins any given year.
The trend: Tech coverage of mega-shows is shifting from announcement-by-announcement reporting toward buyer-side curation, with trusted reviewers becoming the filter layer between the exhibit floor and the wallet.