This is dedicated to my friends (and enemies!) who’ll be spending this week, know colloquially as Hell Week, in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show, or CES. While I feel for y’all—I was scheduled to attend until three weeks ago, when an angel descended from Heaven and told me, sweetly, I didn’t have to go—I can’t help but feel that the show is largely a waste of everyone’s time. And, if Max Weber has taught us anything, it’s that “time is money.”
The official CrunchGear inbox is filled, right now, with all sorts of CES-related product announcements. “We’re coming out with this, our TVs will have that,” and so on. (ProTip: Every device under the sun will stream Netflix movies and/or Amazon movies from here on out; streaming is the new black.) So if these companies are telling us all the details of [new exciting venture/widget] before the show even starts, why bother having the show at all? You’d save more than a few dollars by merely e-mailing some photos to whomever you deem worthy, accompanied by a presser filled with thesaurus-plucked action verbs. Or, if you feel the need to provide hands-on with your widgets so we can all take samey, blurry, entry level dSLR photos, rent out a few hotel rooms in New York and San Francisco. That way no one has to trek out to the middle of nowhere (read: Las Vegas) to receive the same info that everyone else is getting.
Though I sorta get the feeling CES is more about glitz than anything else, like E3. Explosions in the sky, booth babes, free beer, celebrities. Do we really need all that to debut the latest widget? Certainly not.