CES 2025: all the news, gadgets, and surprises

I’m standing outside a nondescript corporate office park in Las Vegas next to a box-shaped vehicle with no proper front or back. It’s got a set of sliding doors, no steering wheel, and touchpad controls. It’s bidirectional, meaning it can move in either direction without turning around. And to be completely frank, it looks more like an oversized toaster than an actual car.

This is the second-generation Zoox robotaxi, a purpose-built autonomous shuttle that has been testing in and around Las Vegas for the last year and a half. Zoox, a subsidiary of Amazon, has been working on it for over a decade, and during this year’s CES, it finally let a few journalists take a ride.

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The first Nintendo Switch basically had the road to itself, and Nintendo instantly proved just how awesome a hybrid console and handheld could be, leading to massive success. We now know that the Switch 2 is set to launch in 2025, but it will be released into a world that’s packed with very capable handheld gaming PCs that could present an interesting challenge to Nintendo, especially following news from CES 2025.

Valve’s Steam Deck kicked off the handheld gaming PC push in large part because its Linux-based SteamOS makes playing your games just about as easy as it is on consoles. That’s why one of the biggest CES announcements is that Valve is going to let people install SteamOS on other handhelds as soon as April, potentially making the entire handheld PC gaming market a lot more appealing.

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LG Display didn’t have its usual exhibit of flashy, breakthrough new screens at this year’s CES. This resulted in an odd situation where it was actually Panasonic that shared the most details about LG Display’s latest and greatest OLED panel. Even before any official announcement, it was already the centerpiece of 2025 flagships like Panasonic’s Z95B and the LG G5 from LG Electronics (not to be confused with the display division).

But now the company is ready to spill the full details on its new four-layer tandem OLED design. “33 percent brighter than the previous generation and optimized for the AI TV era, it is the industry’s first-ever OLED display to achieve a maximum brightness as high as 4,000 nits,” LG Display wrote in a press release that went out tonight. The AI mention made me roll my eyes a bit, but there’s no doubting that this is a very impressive panel.

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There were a slew of innovations in robot vacuums on the CES show floor this year, from arms and legs to extendable mops, movable towers, and new navigation systems.

As the industry races ahead in its quest to find the best way to clean our floors, it can be hard to see the function through all the hype. I spent the last week in Las Vegas hanging with our robot friends to find out just how much better they’re getting. Here’s a look at all the new tech that came out and how it could help keep your floors sparklingly clean.

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Las Vegas is punishingly dry. The arid winter air means I woke up on day three of CES 2025 with a nosebleed, chapped lips, and ashy legs. This was in spite of the fact that I slathered myself with two pumps of a fermented bean essence, eye cream, moisturizer, and a lip mask. Staring at my face in the hotel mirror, I wondered if any of those products were doing what they were supposed to — and if maybe, I should try something different.

This is why I was so eager to try L’Oréal’s Cell BioPrint.

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Honda’s potential merger with Nissan would represent one of the largest shake-ups to the industry since the creation of Stellantis in 2021. But there are huge risks involved, too.

On Tuesday in Las Vegas, during a roundtable discussion with select media, Honda executives offered some more insight into the merger, including how combining resources and factories could help the companies stay competitive in the increasingly costly fight with China.

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Twelve years ago, I could have told you exactly what happened at my first CES and what happened at my third. Each was a chapter with a beginning, middle, and end; the lines between them drawn clearly. But now, 15 years since I attended my first CES, it’s a lot fuzzier. I know I missed my flight home at that first show. I know I saw a lot of cameras at first, and then progressively fewer cameras over the years. I know there were team dinners and early meetings, but I couldn’t tell you what happened when.

What I do know about my first CESes is that I had — and I cannot stress this enough — no clue what I was doing. The same went for CES two, three, and four, to varying degrees. I think I had a Pentax DSLR loaned to me by a colleague. I had a work-issued BlackBerry and, I’m pretty sure, insisted on wearing nice dresses and impractical shoes to evening events. There was no Uber at the beginning, and you could spend an hour waiting in a cab line at the airport. We stayed at the MGM Grand, which housed live lions at the time.

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Godox, a company known for its professional photography gear like flashes and reflective umbrellas, has announced a new lighting product for smartphones. Its MA5R is a magnetic power bank with an array of diffused color-changing LEDs on the back that can improve phone photography while keeping battery anxiety in check. It’s priced at $49, and while you can preorder it through online specialty stores, official availability isn’t known.

The MA5R attaches to MagSafe-compatible iPhones, smartphones supporting the Qi2 wireless standard, or mobile devices upgraded with a magnetic ring on the back. It can also be used handheld, but Godox didn’t include a standard tripod mount for attaching it to stands — an odd omission given the company’s lineup of pro gear.

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Valerion announced a new feature for its VisionMaster Max projector at CES 2025 that will improve setup flexibility. The company will offer alternate lenses for the projector — a feature typically only offered on professional-grade home theater hardware — that can be swapped by users to change the size of the image it produces or how far it can project. That will accommodate a wider range of installations, from smaller living rooms to spacious dedicated home theaters, without sacrificing image resolution.

The VisionMaster Max was originally announced at IFA 2024 by Valerion, which is a sister brand to AWOL Vision that focuses on ultrashort throw (UST) projectors. The brand’s VisionMaster line debuted through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign last October, including the Max model, which offered an optical zoom feature that allows it to project images from 40 to 300 inches in size.

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CES is a TV show. And a car show. And a wearables show. And this year, oddly, kind of a pool-vacuum show? It is the biggest, most elaborate, most bizarre tech show of the year, during which practically the whole industry flies to Las Vegas to show off new stuff and make big deals.

On this episode of The Vergecast, a special live edition of the show from the Brooklyn Bowl in Las Vegas, we talk through as much of it as we can. (Thanks to everyone who came out, by the way! So much fun to get to see and hang out with all of you.) We actually begin the show with a story that didn’t start at CES but took over the week anyway: Meta’s about-face on fact-checking and content moderation. After that, we get into Samsung’s new Frame Pro TV, the end of Dell’s XPS brand, Sony’s bizarrely expensive Afeela car, and more.

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The new CPUs, GPUs, and laptops announced at CES this week set the tone for Windows computers in the year to come — and so far, 2025 is looking pretty promising. There are a bunch of new notebooks I’m excited to test out when they come around, many of which are gaming-focused since the launch of Nvidia’s RTX 50-series cards is ushering in an onslaught of graphics-heavy refreshes and upgrades.

There are many new laptops coming from Dell, Alienware, Asus, Acer, Lenovo, MSI, and Razer. Many may just boil down to chip bumps and slight refreshes, but there are some that are betting big on new ideas, thinness, raw power, and over-the-top accouterments. Here are the ones I’m most excited for.

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There is no other week like CES. Very nearly the entire tech industry descends on Las Vegas to give the world an early look at the inventions and ideas they think will define the year. More new, surprising, exciting, and oftentimes ridiculous ideas are debuted on any given day at CES than during most other weeks of the year.

It’s a ton to keep up with — and it’s also a whole lot of fun. The Verge’s team has been on the ground in Nevada to try out the wildest products we can get our hands on. There’s been a lot of stuff we love. A lot of stuff that weirds us out. And a lot of stuff that’s just downright fun to look at.

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It’s the second day of CES, and I’m waiting in a line to see my 10th pair of smart glasses. I honestly don’t know what to expect: I’ve seen glorified sunglasses with dubious ChatGPT clones. I’ve sidled up to several booths where the glasses were almost carbon copy clones of the pairs a booth over. I’ve seen all manner of “displays” tacked onto the lenses: some washed out, others so tedious to calibrate as to make me walk away.

So when I slipped on the Rokid Glasses, I felt my brows raise. I could see what looked like a mini desktop. I swiped the arm and a horizontal list of apps appeared. Green writing appeared in front of me a bit like a monitor in The Matrix. A Rokid staffer began speaking to me in Chinese, and despite the surrounding din, I could see a text translation of what she was saying float in front of me. After a brief conversation — she asked whether I ate lunch, she hadn’t — she prompted me to try taking a picture. The display shifted to what looked like a camera’s viewfinder. I hit the multifunction button. An animation flashed. On her phone, I saw the picture I took.

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Panasonic returned to the US TV market last year, and only a matter of months later, I’ve convinced myself that its latest flagship OLED is the best TV of CES 2025. It’s an impressive resurgence for a brand that many home theater enthusiasts remember for producing superb plasma sets back when those represented the crème de la crème of display technology for the living room. After a long hiatus, Panasonic is back in the game and squaring off with Sony, LG, and Samsung in the very premium (and very pricey) TV category.

The company’s new OLED, the Z95B, will come in three sizes: 55 inches, 65 inches, and 77 inches. It uses the latest and greatest OLED panel from LG Display, which is a new four-layer tandem structure that beats out the brightness of last year’s LG G4 even without the micro-lens array technology that squeezed as much brightness as possible out of that TV. Last year’s Z95A from Panasonic also used MLA, but the new approach gets better results and is cheaper to produce.

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