The time came and went for our annual tech blow up, Consumer Electronics Symposium, otherwise known as CES is the first opportunity for big-ticket manufacturers like LG Electronics, Samsung, Dell and dozens of others to display the innovations they are bringing to market in the 2019 year or later. We are the consumers of their new products in one way or another, whether it be by our own purchase or through a stocking stuffer when our holiday season rolls around again, so let’s begin that roll forwards with some of the biggest product reveals at CES 2019.

We all love our high definition Television, whether it be for our casual Netflix binge on a Saturday night or blowing out those poor speakers blasting sports, currently the highest display output resolution most commonly known on the market is or 4K, But manufacturers set their new year’s resolution to 8K, which is four times the size of 4K, this does sound confusing to hear, so I’ll do my best to explain it, it’s like going from a toddler to Olympian. Except with performance, the amount of information being driven to your eyeballs is much denser than with 4K. Samsung, Sony, and LG are bringing these new television displays to market in 2019, and with bigger better resolutions, requires new display interfaces. With HDMI 2.1 coming to boot one cable can finally drive this gargantuan resolution rather than the two required for Dells 8K monitor released in 2017 that Linus Tech demonstrated. We’ve finally reached our 8K future and its an exciting time to be that Netflix binging blanket wrapped couch burrito we all are sometimes.

Advanced Micro Devices, the competitor to Intel for the desktop computing space had a lot to say this year, introducing their third generation of Ryzen processors, whose previous efforts brought excellent performance and down to earth prices are part of the best-built computers on the market. But AMD, swooped in from out of left field with another surprise for consumers, whether it be artists, gamers, or video editors, they were begging them to bring another high-end graphics card to market, which would help greatly with 3-D rendered tasks. So AMD delivered the Radeon VII graphics card, a card designed specifically to compete with rival Nvidia’s Ray Tracing line of cards in performance with their 2080 in mind and it accomplishes that all for $100 cheaper. This means great things for us as consumers, with a chance for Nvidia’s long-held dominance on the high end of dedicated graphics to finally be contested, we can hope to see much more competitive product launches from the two companies which ultimately leads to better deals for us the end consumer.

Laptop manufacturers had a lot to say as the fun ensued as they unveiled the RTX graphics refresh of their laptop designs. Which shows the best performances laptops have had to date, which as students that have witnessed the somewhat sluggish performance in laptop hardware currently in use at our schools. Its a good sign of the bright future ahead for what hardware can be available to our students.

Headturners and jaw-droppers can be pretty easily used to describe CES 2019, and the tech community is sure consumers like us will be in for a few more surprises from the biggest brands on the market like Samsung and Apple in the coming months, we’ll just have to wait and see.