CES 2018 will always be remembered partly for what went wrong — a city-wide power outage blacked out a large section of the Las Vegas Convention Center on January 10, forcing thousands of attendees to navigate the show floor in the dark with phone flashlights. It was a genuinely memorable moment of irony at a show dedicated to the future of technology. The power came back in about two hours, and the show carried on.
Samsung debuted an 85-inch 8K QLED TV — the first time 8K had appeared as a consumer product rather than a concept. LG countered with a rollable OLED TV prototype, a design that would become real product within two years. The TV arms race was in full swing, and both companies were clearly spending heavily to out-spec each other.
NVIDIA’s CES 2018 keynote was a turning point for AI hardware awareness in the consumer space. Jen-Hsun Huang arrived in a leather jacket and outlined a vision of AI-driven vehicles, smart cities, and robotics with a showmanship that was becoming the template for NVIDIA keynotes. The Xavier autonomous vehicle processor was unveiled, and NVIDIA’s stock would never look back.
Smart speakers had become a commodity category, with Google Home Mini and Amazon Echo Dot both under $50. The AI assistant era had fully arrived — the question was whether the devices would stay assistants or become something more ambient. ces.tech