Foldable Phones, Powerful Chips and Giant TVs: The Highlights of CES 2023

CES officially begins on Thursday in Las Vegas, but the world’s biggest electronics companies aren’t waiting until then to preview their big products of 2023. On Tuesday we got a look into what companies like Samsung, LG, Nvidia and Dell will be bringing to CES 2023: Beautiful TVs, beastly gaming rigs and even a concept device or two.
This page features the biggest and best news from CES 2023. It’ll be updated throughout the week. Wednesday is an especially big day: It’s CES’ “media day,” when companies like Sony, LG and Samsung hold keynotes featuring their biggest reveals. Intel and Nvidia already played their CES hands — details below — and AMD will go next, on Jan. 4.
This is the first real, in-person CES since 2020 — the pandemic caused 2021 to be fully remote, and 2022 to see a 70% drop in attendance from 2020. After media day, CNET will be on the show floor, finding the weirdest, wildest and best tech being previewed. Here’s all the tech from CES 2023 that you need to know about so far.
Enlarge Image Samsung Display
CES brings a peek into the future
It’s easy to get caught up in the glitz and glamor of CES, but at its core this trade show is all about marketing. Big companies use it as an opportunity to debut their wares of 2023 with deluxe fanfare. But what makes CES special and, dare I say even fun, are the products you can’t buy. The concept products are less “later this year” than “maybe in 2033.”
CES is barely a day old, yet we’ve seen a few of these alluring would-be products.
Samsung has already unveiled a bunch of tech, including an AI-powered oven that can tell you if your food is burning. It also gave us a look at a tantalizing phone concept, the Flex Hybrid. As the model above shows, the left side of the Flex Hybrid can fold, like the Galaxy Fold, while the right side can slide out to extend itself.
The concept comes courtesy of Samsung Display, not the Mobile arm of the South Korean megacorporation responsible for making and sellig phones. But the press release showing off the concept promised it’ll bring to CES “innovative OLED products of all sizes, small, medium and large, to provide a glimpse into the future of displays.” Samsung is not the only company tinkering with the future of phones — see TCL’s 2020 scrolling display — so watch this space for more flipping, folding and scrolling devices.
Enlarge Image Josh Goldman/CNET
The other company to display its vision of the future is Dell, via its Nyx concept line. Perhaps the most noteworthy product is its Nyx gaming controller. At first glance, it very much just looks like another third-party Xbox controller, albiet with some fancy lights. Alas, it’s more than that. The Nyx controller is tricked out with a bunch of hidden inputs, which multiply the functionality of the controller.
The idea seems to be to bridge the gap between a gamepad and a keyboard. PC gamers are able to use hotkey setups to have dozens of inputs, far more than the typical game pad, which is often limited to the options presented by a d-pad. That means they can use a wider range of attacks in an MMO, for instance, or cycle between six or seven guns in a first-person shooter rather than the two or three console gamers are often limited to.
The Nyx controller features a central fingerprint reader, touch sensors under the shoulder buttons that allow you to scroll your finger along for different effects, dual scroll wheels under the center area, and shift buttons on the back that allow you alternate your face button setups. That last feature alone doubles the inputs of the gamepad.
It’s not the most dazzling concept device ever, but it the humble gamepad has changed little over the past two decades. Steps like these are like giant leaps for those who like gaming on both consoles and PCs.
Intel and Nvidia’s chip wars
Sleek displays and dazzling screens are nice, but often its the tech you don’t see that matters most.
Start with Intel, which hosted a keynote on Tuesday ahead of CES. It unveiled a boatload of new 13th generation processors, which will power a huge range of products. The headlining processor is in its high-power Core H-Series processor, which will be the first 24-core processor designed to be used by laptops. The chip can run up to 5.6Ghz, with 8 cores dedicated for strenuous tasks like gaming and rendering. On the other end of the spectrum is the Core i3 N series, which improves the performance of entry-level laptops — arguably a more important goal. We’ll see new laptops sporting Intel’s new processors announced in the days to come at CES.
Less abstract than chip performance are the upgrades they can yield. The new generation of Intel CPUs bring with them Unison, which lets iPhone and Android devices send and receive texts from your PC, as well as Thunderbolt 4, which among other improvements will set as a standard the ability to run two 4K external displays. Again, expect to see these features in product announcements over the next few days.
Nvidia
Then there’s Nvidia. Chief among its announcements are improvements to GeForce Now, its cloud gaming service that allows you to stream games on laptops, phones and more. In short, the power of Nvidia’s GeForce 4080 GPU is coming to the cloud. If you subscribe to the premium tier of GeForce Now — henceforth known as GeForce Now Ultimate — you can now stream games at 240Hz, utilize ray tracing (which significantly improves how light is rendered in-game) and DLSS 3 (which uses an algorithm to boost frame rate while retaining image quality).
Plus, GeForce Now is coming to… cars. If your car has a screen on the dash, you can game while in park. If there are screens behind the driver or passenger seats, those sitting in the back can game on the go. To start off with, Nvidia is partnering with Hyundai, BYB and Polestar.
Finally, Nvidia revealed its RTX 40 series of laptops — laptops that will run on its mobile graphics cards. It highlighted nongaming 14-inch laptops, like the Lenovo Yoga Pro 14 and ZenBook Pro 14 with RTX 4070, 4060 or 4050 mobile chips, shipping in late February starting at $999.
Enlarge Image Josh Goldman/CNET
Thinner and lighter at CES 2023
Speaking of laptops, CES 2023 will have lots of ’em. Alienware surprised us with four new laptops ahead of CES, including the Alienware x14, which the company says is the thinnest 14-inch gaming laptop in the world. Featuring a 2,560×1,600 display with a 165Hz refresh rate, it’ll sell from $1,799 when it ships this winter. A bigger version, the Alienware x16, starting at $3,099.
Those laptops are for people who are willing to sacrifice some power for slicker designs. If you’re only concern is brute force, Alienware’s M18 may be more your bag. It’s Alienware’s most powerful laptop yet, an 18-incher that can be loaded with Intel or AMD processors and Nvidia or Radeon graphics — and up to 9TB of storage.
Two laptops that won’t end up the sexiest of CES but may be the best for many buyers are Dell’s new G15 and G16 gaming laptops. Dell’s G Series has always been a highlight among budget gaming laptops, and the G15 and G16 bring some of the gaudy Alienware design touches to spice things up further. The new models are expected in the spring, with the Dell G15 starting at approximately $849 and the G16 starting around $1,499.
Enlarge Image Josh Goldman/CNET
Meanwhile, LG is embodying “thin and light” with both its laptops and its prized OLEDs. It showed off its new Gram Style laptop, which features hidden touchpad that only presents itself when you touch the palm rest, as well as an 11-millimeter thick Gram Ultraslim device. Somehow, up to 32GB of RAM and 1TB of memory is crammed into that tiny frame, along with a 13th generation Intel chip.
The South Korean electronics giant will do battle at CES with fellow South Korean electrics giant Samsung — not on the laptop front, but rather to over TV supremacy. LG announced it’ll bring to the show several new models, including the OLED C3, a sequel to last year’s C2 — which CNET TV guru David Katzmaiar called the “best high-end TV for the money”. Samsung hopes to compete with its own line of QLED screens, including ones it’ll show at CES that go all the way up to 98 inches.