The best PCs, gadgets, and wearables of CES 2017
Highlights of the best devices we saw in Las Vegas this year. — LAS VEGAS—The annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas tries to get consumers (and the media) excited for the new year with a treasure trove of new devices.
Context & Ripple Effects
This roundup closes out a three-year run of CES coverage in the corpus: after a CES 2016 preview promising VR demos, smart home products, and wearables, Ars Technica's best-of list shows which of those categories actually shipped, and the following year's CES 2018 preview doubles down on the same beats — laptops, TVs, self-driving tech, AR/VR, robots, smart home.
First-order effects
- Vendors whose devices make the best-of list get a second wave of press attention after the show floor closes, since roundups like this one are what most consumers actually read.
- CES's Las Vegas showcase confirms which 2016-preview categories — VR, smart home, wearables — graduated from demo-stage to shipping product.
Second-order effects
- Preview coverage for CES 2018 repeats nearly the identical category list, signaling that exhibitors plan their launches around the show's January slot rather than independent release calendars.
- Media outlets compete on curation rather than access: with thousands of exhibitors, the differentiator becomes the best-of filter, raising the bar for what earns coverage at the next show.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, CES functions less as a launch event than as an annual index of the industry's direction — a role that later forced a reckoning when the show had to reinvent its physical format entirely, as the corpus's later notes on an all-digital 2021 edition and a shortened 2022 conference indicate.
The trend: CES has hardened into the consumer-tech industry's fixed annual reference point, with each year's preview-and-roundup cycle measuring which categories — VR, smart home, wearables, self-driving — survive from one January to the next.