Sure, CES can boast its fair share of hit products that make their debut at the show. Microsoft's original Xbox was shown off for the first time at CES in 2001. DVDs and Blu-Ray were both highlights of past shows. Plus, there are few other venues where a company can reach so many industry taste-makers, media members, and analysts at one time. But for all the past successes, consumers have rebuffed a lot of recent trends that have emerged from the show. Avatar had hit theaters a month earlier, giving companies something to point to as a potential killer app for consumers. Yet consumer response was tepid, and 3D never accelerated sales past the normal pace of replacement cycles.
Two years later, and the Kindle remains a dominant product in its category, while many of the products that debuted at that CES never actually reached the market. "Microsoft has a long history of announcing things at CES keynotes that either never see the light of day or were outright flops," said Avi Greengart, who covers consumer products for Current Analysis. Speaking of tablets, they were one of the biggest trends last year as company after company scrambled to catch up to Apple's blockbuster iPad. Motorola also wasn't alone in its lack of tablet success. Motorola wasn't the only mobile-device company to make a big splash at CES.--The next great hype: Ultrabook For CES, 2012 is shaping up to be the year of the ultrabook. It's a response to Apple's MacBook Air, which the company has never tried to define as a whole new product (hence sticking with the MacBook name).
"It's not a new product category. It's a laptop."
Price, in particular, will be a major factor, since the products tend to sell at a premium to normal laptops.
Vegas is where the tech biz congregates for the annual International Consumer Electronics Show, a showcase for the latest innovations in smart televisions, tablets, digital cameras and a whole lot more. The 2007 introduction of the iPhone took place during CES, just not at CES. If one of themes of the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show was the rise of Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android tablets, this year's CES event will be the year the Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows laptop market is revitalized with so-called ultrabooks. Ultrabooks are not supercomputers packed in small frames, or super electronic reading devices.
At between $700 and $1,000 apiece, and between 3 and 5 pounds, ultrabooks are this year's hot-ticket item at CES. PC-making powers such as Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ), Acer, Asus, Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) and every other computer maker under the sun are expected to tout their ultrabooks at the show in Las Vegas this week. Tablets and netbooks, the darlings of past CES events, are both less expensive. In a September survey of 5,130 U.S. online consumers, we found that 22 percent of PC shoppers said they'd be interested in buying an ultrabook at the current prices. "If ultrabooks are only thin, light Mac Air knockoffs, they won't be very successful," industry analyst Jack Gold told eWEEK. Gold sees ultrabooks evolving over the next couple years.
Of course, the arrival of Microsoft's Windows 8 platform, a touch-oriented interface for tablets, will lead to touch-enabled ultrabooks and convertible tablet/notebook form factors with flip-over covers and extended slide-out screens. In the meantime, analysts such as Current Analysis analyst Avi Greengart see ultrabook pricing as a challenge: "The consumer notebook market is extremely price sensitive, and even if vendors do significantly undercut the MacBook Air pricing somehow, ultrabooks will still come at a premium above regular notebooks. NPD DisplaySearch said in its recent mobile PC forecast that the current premium price points of ultrabooks will temper demand, with some supply limitations in the production of displays thin enough for these computers. To wit, tablet PCs will remain the growth accelerant in the overall mobile PC market in the short term.
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