Why the Consumer Electronics Show Secretly Sucks

Farhad Manjoo isn’t one of the tech journalists descending on Las Vegas this weekend. He decided to stay home and avoid “the overcrowded, overstuffed, chaotic, and profoundly pointless vaporware parade known as CES,” he writes in Slate. The Consumer Electronics Show “is an enormous waste of time,” and all tech journalists know it, he contends—but because it gives them so dang much to blog about, they all schlep out there anyway.

“Instead of news about real products, CES delivers bogus trends,” Manjoo complains. (This year, for example, is supposedly the “Year of the Tablet.”) Companies never show anything interesting, because their news will be instantly buried by some new iPhone dock. “It’s the curse of that old Yogi Berra joke—nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.” These days, tech companies can get plenty of coverage without a trade show, and that’s “why CES is ultimately—and thankfully—doomed.” (More Consumer Electronics Show stories.)