The 3 biggest trends at CES
2019
As the world’s biggest consumer tech show wraps up, here’s
what Apple, Google, and other giants who made news tell us about tech in 2019.
The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is
like a ouija board that forecasts the year in technology to come. It’s a
captivating–and yet rarely perfect–forecast of our future. After all, neither
the iPod, nor iPhone, were announced at CES.
At the same time, the Las Vegas tech show
tends to offer a telling snapshot of the industry itself, as every major
hardware manufacturer comes together to share news in one place. This year
was a particularly quiet show in terms of individual announcements, but it
still demonstrated where the tech industry thinks it’s going over the next
year. Here’s what we noticed.
VIRTUAL ASSISTANTS ARE EVERYWHERE. BUT IS ANYONE USING THEM?
Google and Amazon continued duking it out for
title of most virtual assistants listening to the most people on the most
devices. It’s been a multi-year battle, once led by Amazon, quickly matched by
Google, and now escalating between these two companies like a new cold war.
For the first time ever, Amazon released a
stat on how many Alexa-powered products had been sold. The number was massive–100 million–until you really thought about it. It includes products ranging from
Amazon’s own Echo to third-party hardware like Sonos speakers. In fact, there
are some 28,000 Alexa-powered products on the market, meaning any smart coffee
maker that has Alexa support would be rolled into that figure, too. Just
because a device supports Alexa doesn’t mean people are using the chatbot
technology regularly, or for anything more than hearing the weather report. But
Amazon has certainly been successful in getting its voice assistant into
products.
Meanwhile, Google fired back with a much
bigger number of devices that use the Google Assistant: 1 billion. That’s 10 times as many as Amazon. It helps that the Google Assistant
is part of Android, and Android smartphones are the most popular in the world.
The difference in these figures seems to demonstrate how limited your reach
will be if you don’t have a strong foothold in mobile. Case in point: Moving
forward, Google is trojan-horsing its Assistant onto iPhones via Google Maps, and it’s even offering Samsung’s competing Bixby assistant access to some Google apps like Maps, Play, Youtube, and Gmail.
In any case, virtual assistants are here. The
question now is: Are we really using them? At CES, Google claimed yes–four times more people are using Assistant than last year. But that’s the sort of vague stat
that leaves us wondering: What are they doing with it? Are those interactions
meaningful? And what counts as an active user, anyway?
APPLE IS MAKING NEW FRIENDS
Apple usually skips CES in favor of its own
events, but this week it made a rare attempt to steal the show without actually
announcing any products of its own. The biggest news is that Apple–fresh off
devastating quarterly earnings that showed iPhone growth has tanked–is making a bigger effort to be
interoperable with third-party products, and make its services accessible
without using Apple devices themselves.
You’ll now be able to stream content from an
iPhone to a Vizio, Samsung, or LG TV via the Airplay 2 standard that all three of these big TV manufacturers will be baking into
their sets. This means you’ll be able to mirror your phone onto your TV, or
stream content to it without cables and other headaches. (Sorry, Apple TV! You
seemed very nice!) Here we see Apple operating a lot more like Google, which
has done something similar with Chromecast support in the past. But Apple dove
in at really big scale, seemingly overnight.
More major, however, was Samsung’s
announcement that Samsung TVs will be getting an
integrated iTunes app. That means you won’t need any Apple
hardware whatsoever to stream iTunes content to a TV. Here we see signs of
Apple recognizing its need to embrace its services business, rather than simply
sell hardware. And dang, it’s actually kind of cool, right? Of course your
iTunes library should be as flexible to stream as Netflix, HBO, and other
popular apps. The announcement teases a new future for Apple that’s decoupled
from pricey hardware (which we really shouldn’t be replacing every two years,
anyway).
Finally, one tangential Apple-CES item that
should be mentioned was a stat Tim Cook shared in an interview with CNBC. Cook said that the company’s wearable products–the Apple Watch and
AirPods–create more revenue than the iPod line did at its peak. This
demonstrates the scale that Apple works at nearly 20 years since it launched
the first iPod. It also portends the importance of wearables to Apple’s future
as it explores services.
THE WAY WE GET AROUND IN THE POST-UBER WORLD WILL CHANGE, AGAIN
When I took a ride in Waymo’s first driverless taxi last year, I noticed something
interesting: The app interface doesn’t show your route–it just shows the start
point and end point. I joked to one of Waymo’s product developers that it had
already designed its interface for flying cars. They laughed, but only a
little. Perhaps because that’s exactly the kind of thinking that the mobility
industry is doing, now that self-driving technologies are maturing and digital
ride hailing has been figured out. The way we move is only going to keep
changing.
This long-term–and wildly futuristic–strategizing
was on full display at CES. For starters, the Uber partner Bell showed off a second-stage
concept of its flying car that both companies swear
they will begin testing in 2020. (This has been on the docket for a while.) A full-scale model on the CES floor promised to fly five people at
speeds reaching 150 mph. Of course, it didn’t actually fly, but it’s
being taken seriously for an important reason: Bell is an established aircraft
developer that makes the propulsion technology behind the V-22 Osprey (the crazy-expensive military helicopter plane thing).
Hyundai also shared its vision for a wild car
with four wheels and four legs called the Elevate. It’s designed for first responders who need to wheel and crawl their
way through difficult terrain. A concept rendering also showed the Elevate
lifting a person in a wheelchair up the steps of their brownstone. The concept
offered a taste of what’s possible if robotics and self-driving technologies
marry in just the right way–and it makes a superb complement to the latest
concepts showed off by Toyota, which has been running a contest to offer people in wheelchairs
high-tech alternatives to everyday transit.
Segway–which some might remember built a
standing wheelchair years ago–also showed up to CES with two interesting
announcements of its own. First, it will build more durable scooters–which is good and necessary!–in a partnership with Lyft.
Secondly, Segway showed off a delivery robot
that looks something like a filing cabinet on wheels with an iPad taped to the top. Developed for office buildings and
malls, you can imagine it delivering staplers and Starbucks, but not much more.
At first glance, the bot is a perfect example of CES being used for marketing
hype more than a viable product–especially since delivery robots have had a
tough time coming to market (they were quickly banned in San Francisco before legislators changed their minds).
Mercedes is making a play for mass transit of
its own through the introduction of something the company calls Vision Urbanetic. It’s a combination of cars and IT infrastructure that’s designed to
declog city streets using a combination of sensors, algorithms, and
self-driving vehicles. (It’s pretty much an Uber/Lyft/Waymo competitor, from
what I can tell.) I have no clue if they can pull it off, but the glowing,
self-driving Mercedes was right at home on the Vegas strip.
As the annual tech show finishes up today,
we’re left with a vision of a tech industry pushing plenty of flashy flying car
concepts and other typically bombastic CES announcements. But based on the way
Google, Amazon, and now Apple showed up at CES, 2019 will be full of surprises,
too. One thing is certain: It’s shaping up to be a year when platform
holders continue to spread their tentacles into every nook and cranny of
our lives.
BY MARK
WILSON
https://www.fastcompany.com/90290140/the-3-biggest-trends-at-ces-2019?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fast%20Company%20Daily&position=5&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=01112019
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