The world is still (more or less) limited. Teleworking is coming and represents radical social change, but CES, the show where the industry’s reaction and the presentation of solutions for the future can be witnessed was a failure in that sense.
In fact, it was a CES as in the past, apart from its virtual format. We saw one continuous message block and they don’t seem to want to realize that the pandemic has changed us, maybe forever. For example, where are the webcams?
CES 2021 doesn’t know what 2020 was
At Engadget, we treated CES 2021 with the same intensity as in previous years: these 60 topics demonstrate and represent them is part of what triggers the tech industry for this 2021.
Laptops of all colors (yes, very playful), MicroLED television (because OLED is just a trend in smaller panels), processors and graphics cards, and of course the products that make the headlines (and look lustful) although we will probably never see them on the street or in the office.
There were also some very real, very original, and very bold products. The ThinkBook Plus Gen 2 i with Your e-ink rear window This is the best example of that ambition.
What a fantastic idea, maybe a bit limited by the fact that the screen cannot be rotated to become the main screen. This ‘yotaphone’ of notebooks makes us dream that at some point this technology will be applied to many other monitors, like the one from Paperlike that we saw a few weeks ago.
Of course, The extraordinary is rare and CES 2021 was a particularly continuous fair. Intel said “Hey, don’t forget me” with a very cautious start, but this giant needs to be given a chance (more), especially now that he’s changing CEOs and seems to be very responsive with some expected.
There weren’t any big surprises from AMD either, that although it had a much stronger start with its new Ryzen 5000 for laptops, how Intel has kept a line very continuous and that doesn’t seem to want to know anything (at least for the time being) of this revolution, which for many (and I include myself) represent the Apple M1.
When asked about this, Lisa Su, CEO of the company, only stated that this chip is a demonstration of “how much innovation there is in this market,” but for her, “there is still the ability to innovate … in the PC Segment “as if ARM chips don’t seem like a future alternative for AMD or even a plan B..
This continuity was evident in the presentation of several (logically) other laptops. A bit more efficient in everything, especially in the graphics thanks to the new Nvidia GPUs, which, as expected, have already managed to integrate their new RTX 3000 into laptops. Funny thing is I do something like this without solving the real problem for many players: There is hardly any way to get dedicated graphics from the new generation of Nvidia at the recommended retail price.
The situation is so bad that this company has delayed introducing new variants like the RTX 3080 Ti. In addition, several manufacturers have announced that they will be raising the prices of their latest models as US taxes on these products have increased. . We left Malaga to fall in Malaga.
It’s like 2020 didn’t teach us anything. As if the manufacturers hadn’t discovered it last year The PCs are lifted from their ashes: 26.1% were sold in the fourth quarter of 2020 compared to the same period of the previous year. The reason is obvious: the pandemic.
If we needed a revolution in anything, it was in the webcams
Even so, manufacturers haven’t changed the score: lots of gaming laptops, lots of refresh rates and RGB lights, but few working work laptops, few compact desktops and, even if it’s amazing, No news from webcam manufacturerswho appear to want to keep squeezing the goose that lays the golden eggs and maximize the benefits of their currently available models.
Price development of the Logitech C920 HD Pro after CamelCamelCamel. The price has quadrupled after the pandemic and video conference fever.
Logitech is (In my opinion, every two weeks on Sunday at this time, I take turns posing with Javier Lacort) an absolute disappointment in this direction. I recently commented on it elsewhere: The Logitech C920 HD Pro was $ 30 in November 2018. Today it costs (hopefully) three times as much.
Laptop webcams while they haven’t evolved that much. You don’t have much headroom, of course – the lid is still too thin to ask for miracles – but there’s no suggestion from manufacturers to fix the problem. Even Apple seems to have gotten over the problem, and its new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro 13 with the M1 chip have a walk-in webcam.
One of the alternatives is to go to other webcam manufacturers. At Amazon, for example An avalanche of webcams has arrived They promise great quality at ridiculous prices (be careful: either you have one or the other, both are utopia). There are decent suggestions, of course, but it’s surprising that after months of a pandemic, neither Logitech nor any other company has come up with new products to alleviate an obvious need during these times.
It is true that it is possible Use a mobile camera For this purpose there are options for it. There are even those who have found a way to hold the phone in the position we would have a webcam in, but these are not options for ordinary mortals.
The only noticeable suggestion came from Dell, which these days has introduced monitors with built-in webcams. The ingenious system hides them when we aren’t using them to avoid suspicion and that’s one of the few answers to that A pandemic that kept us in check in 2020 and what it will be like in 2021 as well.
But at least for industry When it comes to CES, everything seems to stay the same. What was the new normal?
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