CES roundup: flexible screens are coming, battle between Intel and AMD to intensify, sex tech is on the rise, tech companies fetishized AI and 5G a little less
iCES is over, and I am quite sure you'll be happy to be done with it. We still have more to come today and perhaps a little next week.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Verge spent the first week of January setting expectations for the show — foldable and dual-screen laptops, 5G phones, and gaming CPUs topped its CES 2020 preview — and the roundup closes the loop: the flexible-screen hardware is real and heading to market, and the Intel-AMD CPU fight is the story to watch through 2020. The most telling line is what receded: after years of 5G phones and AI everything dominating CES previews, vendors dialing back the AI and 5G fetishization is itself a signal about where the hype cycle stood in January 2020.
Read against the later coverage in this corpus, that dial-back looks like a trough before a peak — CES 2024 centered on laptops with Intel's Core Ultra chips and AI processing TVs, and CES 2025 doubled down with AI-feature TVs and Nvidia 50-series laptops. The 2020 roundup is the data point showing AI hype was not yet the show's organizing theme.
First-order effects
- Intel and AMD enter 2020 with the CPU battle intensifying, putting gaming-PC buyers at the center of a pricing and performance fight both companies previewed at the show.
- The flexible screens shown at CES move from concept demos toward shipping products, validating the foldable and dual-screen laptop category The Verge flagged in its previews.
Second-order effects
- AMD's gaming CPU momentum forces Intel to compete on performance-per-dollar rather than brand alone, tightening margins across the desktop and laptop segments both serve.
- Sex tech's rising consumer demand pushes the category further into the CES mainstream, pressuring retailers and platforms that have historically treated it as fringe to stock and market it as a normal consumer segment.
Third-order effects
- The 2020 dial-back of AI and 5G hype, followed by the AI-dominated shows of 2024 and 2025, illustrates how CES themes cycle: a technology gets over-fetishized, retreats to substance, then returns as the show's structural centerpiece once the hardware actually ships.
- If flexible screens keep moving from booth demos to retail, form factor becomes the differentiation lever in laptops as the CPU spec race between Intel and AMD commoditizes raw performance.
The trend: CES theme cycles run from hype to retreat to dominance — the year vendors dialed back AI and 5G fetishization preceded the shows where AI hardware became the entire agenda.