“Disclaimer: This is a computer-generated transcript. There may be errors”
Prakash Sangam:
Hello, everyone, happy new year to all of you. Welcome back to another episode of Tantra’s Mantra, where we go behind and beyond the tech news headlines. I’m your host, Prakash Sangam, founder and principal at Tantra Analyst.
Well, every year, many of you like me start the year with visit to CES. To be honest, CES kind of ruined some of the holiday fun. It was even more when I was working in marketing, where we had to do months of preparation, and it kind of reaches Crescendo the last week of December.
That’s when the holidays happened, but it’s much less now, as I don’t have to do a lot of preparation for the event being an analyst. But nonetheless, it still affects my holiday enjoyment. Okay, so anyway, I did this year’s yearly pilgrimage to Las Vegas, like many of us do, and we’ll talk about CES in this episode.
At a high level, I don’t think there was a strong single theme to this year’s event. Of course, there was a lot of AI everywhere. More than just hype, it was more of a show and tell on use of AI for many things, which I think is good. There are a lot of robotics for both consumer and industrial.
As usual, automotives were a main attraction. Some interesting compute and laptop stuff too, for example, you know, had a bunch of announcements and their laptop with reliable displays, kind of interesting. Their XR products and drones. Xpeng had this interesting concept of personal drone and nestled in a SUV, which I think was interesting.
A lot of automotive announcements. Honda had a couple of interesting concepts. Honda, Sony, Afila, you know, showcased their product and had more details on availability, picing, and so on. Many of the Chinese brands have their automotives on display. You know, some self-driving cars and so on.
NVIDIA had tons of announcements, and they’re entering into, you know, laptops and so on. A lot of news, a lot of distributed news on different fronts, but not a major theme. obviously, a lot of smart home stuff too, and IoT without calling it IoT. So to discuss all of that and to recap the event, I have my friend and fellow analyst, Leonard Lee, with me here.
Hi, Leonard. Welcome to the show.
Leonard Lee:
Hey, Prakash. Thanks for having me. Happy New Year, and it’s great to jump back on Tantra’s Mantra.
Prakash Sangam:
Absolutely. What was your overall impression of the event?
Leonard Lee:
Well, been to so many of these now, right? It’s hard to really now distinguish the experiences outside of one year. Not being there because of the pandemic, and then now we’re seeing the event gradually ramp back up, right?
It was weird. I thought that this year’s event was less attended, but it ended up being more attended, or at least the attendee number that came out and was published, I think indicated about 143,000 people attending versus 138, I think it was from last year’s event.
But nonetheless, it’s a hectic, massive, massive event, right?
And in my research, I cover so much, it is difficult to pick up on it under, let’s call it a big theme. I’m still kind of thinking about it, right? Because we witnessed so many things, walked so many halls, talked to so many people. It’s oftentimes difficult to get to the salient, meaningful points from underneath all of the hype.
All I have to say is this year, the hype was pretty, it was pretty intense because I think you mentioned AI. AI is coming to the edge and that really got kicked off with NVIDIA’s keynote where Jensen got up on stage and started to introduce his vision to a consumer audience or mostly consumer audience what is the vision for edge AI is, right?
With the introduction of Cosmos, this whole idea of physical AI. And just to note, these are not new things. These are like repackaging of things that NVIDIA has been working on with its partners for a very long time, right? I think to a consumer audience is going to sound a lot like something new and magic, even to a gaming audience, which I think if you were to think of the consumer audience and their association with NVIDIA, it’s largely in gaming, right?
Gaming GPUs and the laptops and such. And so what we’re looking at with physical AI and the robotics and all this stuff with Cosmos, with the world model, these are new topics, I think, for most folks in the consumer space.
Prakash Sangam:
Yeah. Robotics, I mean, have been around for a long time, but I think the AI coming to robotics, I think that kind of changes the game and sets it in a very nicely for the future things, right?
Leonard Lee:
So, yeah, yeah. And I think even robotics is kind of new. I mean, I remember two years ago when, you know, this is just after ChatGPT was kind of unveiled. Literally, immediately, you had folks at Eureka Park plugging ChatGPT via an API, probably a homegrown API to an animatronic contraption, right?
Or, you know, if you want to call a robot, you can call a robot. But there are some companies that were already coming to market with, or at least coming to Eureka Park with those types of demonstrations. But we’ve seen these kind of demonstrations quite a while back, you know, all the way, I don’t know, since 2017.
Prakash Sangam:
Yeah, I mean, I remember right before the pandemic, any event you go to, they would always have a robot dog. Somebody will be working on it, and they’ll have a humanoid, you know, behind in a glass shelf somewhere in, in almost every, every booth.
Leonard Lee:
So yeah, and that’s one of the challenges with CES is, you go there, and it’s oftentimes challenging to remember the continuum of how, how different technologies are evolving.
And, you know, there are rare occasions where you see some convergence happening, that thing, net new, that’s really interesting or maybe even pivotal.
But I think with this year, a lot of this was AI or new forms of AI, largely driven by generative AI, trying to figure itself out, you know, I don’t think it’s really settled on anything.
So a lot of what we saw at CES 2025 is a setup for what we’ll probably see in 2020. Yeah, I mean, it’s a continuum, right?
Prakash Sangam:
And I think one positive development I would say is basically, it’s more of show and tell of AI, you know, when it comes to say consumer side of it. There’s a lot of demos actually using AI for many, many things, very mundane things to very complex things.
Not that all of them were valid use of AI, at least they’re, you know, especially Jenny, they’re thinking from the point of view of implementing it, which I think is good, other than just talking about it. I think that was a good development in my view.
Leonard Lee:
Yeah, yeah. And I think that conversation is going to continue to go on. The other thing, but one thing that did kind of stick out was this revisiting of Smart Home. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I thought that was interesting. And that was really teed off by the LG Press Conference, where they introduced a lot of new Smart Home related features.
And then that was quickly followed up by the Samsung Press Event, where I mean, it was literally all about smart living, right? And the centerpiece being your home. But obviously, with Samsung, and they have devices that cross different modalities of your digital life from Smartphone to laptops or PCs, to all the appliances in your home.
And if you think of Samsung even more broadly as a chaebol, they’re into everything, right? They’re even into construction, heavy industries. And then on the LG side, I had no idea that they’re making a laptop, but they were talking about their laptop and some of the new privacy and security features that they’re incorporating into those offerings.
And so they’re trying to get back into the game. So, I was wondering, and I don’t know what your take on this is, Prakash, but I was wondering if they’re going to go back and get back into mobile, into smartphones. You know what I mean? Because that’s like now the missing link for them, right? They used to have it and they used to make good smartphones.
Prakash Sangam:
So, they had this LG Gram laptop for a long time, right? I mean, I used them. Their construction is pretty nice. They’re very light. I have not used them as a regular laptop, but I tested a couple of them here and there. They’re pretty good.
Yeah, I think to answer your specific point on it, in this continuum of user experience between individual users, enterprises and different use cases, I think people who don’t have an iron in each part of that ecosystem will feel the burn, right? In the sense that they cannot provide that end-to-end kind of user experience, which people who have, like as you mentioned, Samsung can provide, right?
So yeah, Samsung, that’s another big change. This year was TVs were not the mainstay of the event, right? So far, you enter the Central Hall, all you see are like that huge TVs everywhere, right? That was not the case.
Leonard Lee:
Yeah, the wall of foldable screens and transparent screens. Yeah, that was like the rage for the last three years, right? Yeah, different kinds of TVs.
Prakash Sangam:
This year, I mean, if you take Samsung booth, for example, I think more than 60% was all connected things, smart things as they call it. Yeah, they would have called IoT before, but not much use of IoT name as such, but it is that, like connected home, connected cities, smart cities and so on.
Also, I think they had their SmartThings, which is their brand name for everything connected IoT and otherwise. They also had SmartThings Pro, which is an interesting progression where they were basically taking this to the enterprises and managing the smart things within the enterprise space through an API or through their, it’s like more of a concept which was interesting.
So it’s more of a, not more of the same, but evolution of managing all smart things in enterprise through a pro kind of an approach.
Leonard Lee:
That’s very interesting, yeah. Yeah, and there was a lot of mention of matter. And I think a lot of this smart home or smart living redux is being driven by this anticipation that agentic AI is going to bring some of that orchestration and management of data experiences, personalization, and within the network, right?
Or within the home and secured within the confines of the household rather than being shared with a third party or service provider and resident in their cloud, right? So I think an interesting development, I think it’s still going to just be an exploration at this point. We’ll see if they make anything happen within the course of the year. But I thought that was probably one of the strongest themes coming out of CES this year.
And I think it’s supplanted for a lot of the big consumer tech companies, it’s supplanted to TV screen. Yeah, and I think the Chinese vendors were also doing a lot in this area as well, right?The smart home, because if you want to TCL and Hisense, they went out of their way, really, to put in the forefront, their smart city, smart infrastructure, smart vehicles.
So, you know, Hisense has some things that they’re doing in the EV market. And so, really expressing the broad, you know, the breadth of their businesses that I think a lot of us don’t know about, since, you know, these guys probably keep things, you know, to the local markets, if you will, in terms of what they showcase and focus on.
Prakash Sangam:
Right. on matter, I think Samsung made it pretty clear, if you go through all the demos, matter is kind of the fabric that connects all of these smart things, right? And my pet peeve about Samsung is, I mean, it continues to be the case, is that they were trying to address everything.
They said, oh, I mean, our point is that we manage and connect and make this the part of smart things is each and everything, not just Samsung things. So I think if they can highlight how life would be even better using their same smart things, fabric and portfolio when your Samsung things.
And I think that would be from an analyst point of view, for a company, that would be even better than saying that, oh, we treat everybody, everything will be connected no matter who the OEM is. I think they can bring better value to their shareholders because they are everywhere, right?
As we talked about in every part of the home. And so I think they can tell a better cohesive story and make it work even better if it is end-to-end Samsung. Of course, you support other things, but I think for whatever reasons, they are not telling that story.
I mean, if they want to take a feedback from us analysts, is that you can basically tell a much better Samsung end-to-end all of its story than anybody else in this space. But for whatever reason, they are not doing it. They are saying, oh, we treat all and every vendors under this smile, as long as they support smart things. Some smart things will treat them equal, which I don’t know makes sense or not.
Leonard Lee:
Yeah. Well, I think they may be cognizant of the reality that a lot of their competitors are only exposing so much through matter in terms of functionality and features. So I had a chance to talk to the folks at Bosch. Basically, what they seem to be asserting was, if you use, let’s say, one of their appliances, you’re going to get all the premium features of their connected automated appliance functions on their app.
And then, if you are connecting to, let’s say, a third party home hub, smart home hub, you might get maybe the bare minimum. Yeah, a fraction of it. Yeah, so the appliance guys and the device guys are differentiating by keeping the good stuff within their applications and their, let’s say, control. And providing just the minimum. Yeah, to the open ecosystem, if you will. Based on market dynamics, you would expect each and every vendor to have a bond and how much they openly share with other vendors, right?
Then they will lose control. I mean, then whoever owns the hub will have the primary interface to the customer and all other guys will lose it.
Prakash Sangam:
So I know the objective of matter is so that there is one common fabric and common language across everybody. But I think it’s more of utopia that there will be, in terms of experience, best experience when you use that specific app for that specific vendor, in my view. I’m not sure that there will ever be a place where, no matter what application you use on your phone, the experience of all the devices is similar.
So I think that’s kind of utopia. We’ll see how that goes. Especially when, if you don’t have everything in a home, smart home, for example, then you have to partner with others and make sure everything works perfectly with everything else. But when you have everything that home needs, then I think there is better value to show how they work, even more homogeneously with each other and of course supporting the others, right?
Anyway, so, and I also like your point about the Chinese companies. I mean, you get to only see the Chinese technology in these shows, right? CS, Mobile Congress for sure for networking, and we went to IFA there. It’s kind of, I know when I look at them, it’s kind of sad. I don’t know when you call it sad or unhappy that a lot of, they have a lot of great technology, but for geopolitical reasons, it’s not coming to the US, right?
So for example, automotive, the lot of Chinese companies showing their automotive products. And then, you know, for example, the Xpeng, I think that’s one of the coolest things of the show for me, Xpeng personal drone that muscles into a SUV that you can drive around. So that, and there are some cool EVs with charging. You can get up to 80% charge with 10 minutes. You’re charging at 800 volts and lot of cool battery and EV charging technologies, which probably will not come to US because they are Chinese. I’m kind of a little bit saddened at lot of this technology that is very cool. We’ll never see light of the day in the US.
Leonard Lee:
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a lot more that didn’t come to CES this year because actually, I only saw a few. You know, you mentioned Xpeng or a spang, I don’t know how you pronounce the name of the company. You named them that they’re kind of like a showcase, more of a show. That was more of a showcase type. And then there was Zeeker. And I didn’t really see anyone else other than Honda.
For a few years, everyone was calling CES now the automotive show. And I think how much less so, especially since the EV trend has kind of diminished a bit. You have some folks that are there trying to pitch the SDV story or the software divine vehicle story still. Not a lot of brand showing up. OEM brand showing up at all. Mercedes-Benz isn’t there. Toyota is not there.
None of the US brands were there. So I think for automotive, the story has moved away from the vehicle itself to more of a software abstraction layer with through SFE, more of services and other things. And I agree, the interest in EV is veining. So it was not as big a show for automotives as it was in the previous years. Yeah, I think infotainment is really where things are landing in cabin experiences.
I think that’s where the folks at Qualcomm are focusing on. Obviously, they have strong interest in expanding the ADAS market and interest. That’s tough, but the players like Qualcomm really want to drive that, right? That reinvention of the automobile.
But, yeah, curiously, there were a number of companies that were there that do test simulation, you know, both hardware and software. And so there were elements of, let’s say, that whole automotive or future of auto ecosystem there. It’s definitely shifting.
Prakash Sangam:
Yeah. And there are so much less autonomous driving ADAS this year, right?
Leonard Lee:
Yeah. Compared to previous years. If you go to China, the picture is probably very different. And that’s why I think CES, it’s no longer a global view on technology. It’s really becoming increasingly the western view of more technology.
Prakash Sangam:
Global minus China. So there are still a lot of Chinese presence. But more of showcasing it rather than commercial and other stuff. And, you know, when we’re talking about automotives, I think there are two things I saw which were interesting. EVs and self-driving, moving from consumer to industrial space.
I was talking to a couple of folks there. Any application where you have fixed routes, right? And then fixed driving scenarios, that’s where they’re seeing value of using EV and self-driving. Fewer anomalies, fewer corner cases, which means Republic, I think, was the waste management company.
They actually brought a garbage pickup truck to the show, actual working model, which is already on the roads. And they said they saw a lot of improvement in terms of efficiency.
And then there are a lot of heavy industries, construction and so on, where EVs are playing a role. A lot of these were autonomous because they can define the boundaries, they can define the functions.
I mean, if it is road driving for a consumer, then it is wild west, right? There are tons of quarter cases that you have to all address. But if it is a well-defined use case function and area, then range anxiety is not an issue. And then a lot of this fewer current cases. So I don’t know what you saw there.
Leonard Lee:
Yeah, I’m starting to scratch my head wondering why these companies show up. I know that they make for cool stories and headlines, but if this is a consumer show, I mean, what are the likes of John Deere trying to message and say by showing up? I mean, I get it. You’re using technology beyond, you know, typically having the largest device on the show floor, the entire conference. What is the purpose, you know?
Prakash Sangam:
Yeah, so I asked one of them on. So he said, well, of course, kind of marketing and branding as well, right? I mean, the moment you hear John Deere, nobody thinks them to be a technology company, more of an agricultural company doing tractors. They wanted to change that brand image because they do a lot more technology.
And actually, the technology that goes into agriculture itself is very fascinating, right? So they are trying to do this to attract talent, for sure, because they need a lot of good engineers, soft engineers to do it, and also partnerships. That is one.
And second thing is, although it is CES, it’s a consumer show, but it is moving away from pure consumer-only show, right? Since the technologies are spilling over to industrial space, it is becoming, obviously, it’s not a Hanover Massé, but there is a large part of the show space dedicated to industrial automation part of it. Basically, a good meeting place for them as well, and interfacing with the technology companies which are giants in the consumer space. So I think that makes sense. I don’t know what you think.
Leonard Lee:
We’ll see how much longer it lasts. I think it’s one of those things where eventually over time, just like the big auto names that have disappeared from the hall, they’re going to eventually have played that campaign out.
Prakash Sangam:
It could be, because as I said, their primary object is not to showcase their products for people to buy, but more of a good interface to the technology industry because a lot of the technologies that start when consumer will move on to industrial space, so it’s a good place for them to showcase their opportunity and interface with the ecosystems. Once they establish that, then there is less of a need to bring this huge, biggest tilling machine or whatever that John Deere had at the show.
Leonard Lee:
And I mean, my opinion is, I think the CES, I mean, although CTA probably wants to grow the event, it’s already just ridiculously massive. A little bit of fine tuning and paring down couldn’t hurt.
Prakash Sangam:
Yeah. In my opinion. And but anyway, they probably don’t like hearing this, but a little bit of consolidation and focus, I think, could really help the program. I think, I mean, it’s because the industrial is become so big and there is no major single industrial show in US. The biggest we all know is Hannover Messe happening in Europe, in Germany. So maybe this is an opportunity that they break away. That also kind of takes some of the pressure out of CES, that they have a similar industrial electronic show.
Leonard Lee:
Yeah. And I think there, it seems like there’s some resurgence in the interest in IoT. Again, I think a lot of it driven by this realization that in order to have good AI, you really need to have good data, and you need to be able to capture data probably in a higher level of fidelity than you might have at the moment. So it seems like there’s some resurgence in interest there. We’ll see where that goes.
And also, that’s where AI kind of touches people much more in their daily mundane things, improving their efficiency, experience, and so on. So there is a lot of value in using AI in those IoT applications. Maybe that will make IoT more profitable for the companies. So far, it’s been a lot of talk, not many people. We always talk about this, right? Hardly anybody makes money in IoT.
Yeah. Actually, historically, nobody made money off of AI either. I think people forget that.
There isn’t money in AI, other than this notion that somehow GenAI supercomputing is where the money is at. Yeah, sure. You have hyperscalers spending a ton of money on these things.
But when you ask the question, so what is being used for? The outsized answer is used for model building, right? And all of that spend, it’s still investment, right? It’s not written on the investment. So we are still in the eye of ROI.
Prakash Sangam:
So yeah, that’s a big topic that I think we can address later, but I get your point.
Leonard Lee:
But even with robotics, I mean, that’s been around for a while, but I guess it begs the question, and how does that play out in terms of the economics? Because I think software and the AR bit is going to be less and less of the consideration. It’s a hardware game.
All of a sudden, you have to worry about hardware. You know? And so that’s something that I was thinking about as we were teeing up for this podcast is like, hey, you know, robotics is a hardware game. So this is going to be really interesting, you know, how that plays out because.
Prakash Sangam:
Yes. So I think the idea is software can increase the value of that hardware, right? I think that’s where the opportunity is.
Leonard Lee:
Yeah. But you know, a lot of that AI is more on the sensory and perception side of things.
And so, you know, that’s where it gets tricky to have that AI conversation if you’re just being very generic about what you mean by AI, especially if that genericism includes generative AI. I think in 2026, we’re going to see the results of how these physical AI and robotic explorations go this year.
Yeah. I mean, we’ve seen a lot of gimmicks in the past. Some of these things that they were showcasing didn’t look and seem all that different. Again, you know, a lot of things that were interest-induced, these are repackagings of things that have already existed, right?
They’re just being exposed to a consumer audience who might think that this is the best thing since sliced bread was invented yesterday, you know?
Prakash Sangam:
And moving on to compute, you know, I was at Lenovo booth, checked a few of the demos. I’m assuming you did as well. I think this laptop with the reliable display, I think that was pretty impressive, right? I really loved it.
Leonard Lee:
Yeah, that was really, really cool. You know, initially, I was thinking, when would I ever use this, right? And then it rolled out and they started browsing, browsing the Internet with it and, you know, brought up a couple of pages. You know, that real estate can be pretty useful. You can see a lot more. And it was pretty slick, you know, it didn’t seem cumbersome in a design that really struggled to do what it does.
Prakash Sangam:
Correct. I mean, I use multiple screens when I’m on my desk. Actually, the display is being lateral next to each other. After looking at that, one below the other, not next to each other, is more useful. So even if you don’t use all of that space as one display, even with split screens, I think that is pretty useful. And, you know, in terms of productivity, I think it is better than displays next to each other, right?
Leonard Lee:
Yeah, yeah. And, yeah, you know, I thought it was interesting to see, I think, well, let’s take a step back here. You know, in terms of AIPC, you know, a lot of leaning into the Intel chipsets. You know, AMD obviously made some big announcements, but I felt like I saw Intel quite a bit.
They were kind of like, I guess, they were a little, they seemed to be silent. A lot of people don’t notice them, but in the OEM events, they were quite visible. So I was one of the things I noticed as well on the computer side. If we’re talking about silicon. I did end up going to the AMD event.
That was pretty interesting. The big news item was the Ryzen, I think it’s called Ryzen Max. Their announcement with Dell for a enterprise PC. So that was something that perked a lot of folks’ attention there. I mean, it’s an announcement. Let’s see what kind of traction they get. I mean, a lot of activity happening.
And I think this year definitely is going to be a very exciting year for the PC market. Not just laptops, desktops, gaming. It’s going to be pretty crazy, especially with NVIDIA. Now, talking more about their version or their vision, what the AIPC is, right? With the introduction of Digit as well as a Blackwell-infused GeForce GPU.
They’re bringing a different, like a top-down definition of what a quote-unquote AIPC is. It’s incredibly interesting stuff. So I think it’s high time now that there are some good use cases this year, right? So the AIPC so far has been sold on the Better performance and so on till we are waiting on use cases, applications to really use all that AI in the machine.
Yeah. And I think one thing’s for certain, the X series overall has had such a huge impact on the PC. Obviously, a lot of this is really being overall driven by the anxiety that Apple caused with Apple Silicon. A lot of these machines, and I have tested a lot of the Lenovo machines with different silicon, and wow, the battery life improvements have been dramatic.
And I can’t really tell a difference between that battery life or that endurance that I have with my MacBook Air versus a Lunar Lake or an Exelite or an AMD processor, you know, an AI300 processor. So it’s a different world. And it’s going to be crazier.
Prakash Sangam:
Yeah, a lot of things to look forward to. So, any closing comments?
Leonard Lee:
Any closing comments? Yeah, I thought that this year’s event was interesting. We didn’t talk about the things that didn’t show up, which I think were just as interesting. I guess I’ll just mention those. I thought XR came in pretty light, even though there’s a lot of excitement around X-Real and these smart glasses.
They’re not really smart glasses. They’re more like peripherals, spatial peripherals, right? A lot of it being inspired by the Vision Pro, it’s pretty obvious to that. But the way I put it, it’s almost like a deconstructed Vision Pro. You’re taking a particular kind of use case in your purpose designing that device or purpose positioning that device for that particular use case, like doing productivity on an airline or in a bus, which actually ends up being a pretty valuable use case. It’s just people may not realize it because he sees keep getting small and smaller.
Yeah.
Prakash Sangam:
Just a quick note on that. I’ve been, ever since the Vision Pro came in, I’ve been advising and saying this, that it is very difficult to beat Apple at its own game, coming up with another Vision Pro clone. The best strategy would be design something ground up specifically for a use case, and it does much better than anybody else in that use case and price it accordingly. I think that’s the winning strategy and seems like people are adopting that.
Leonard Lee:
Yeah. And I think X-Real is probably as close to executing on that strategy. And the other thing that I thought was interesting is the absence of any mention of 5G. I didn’t hear it at all. I bring that up because it used to be such a big thing a few years ago. Just a couple of years ago and there’s literally no mention of it.
So IoT and 5G where you did not even see mention of once anywhere, right? I think we’re still in the trough of disillusionment with those technology themes.
Prakash Sangam:
Yeah. Okay. All right. That was a great discussion, Leonard. Thank you for sharing your insights. We’ll see how many of the things that showed up at the event, will eventually come to the market this year.
Leonard Lee:
Well, here’s the one last thing that I’ll say. What we learned from last year, the thing that everyone is getting most excited about this year, is the thing that will probably be insignificant next year. And that’s what we’ve learned that.
Because if you don’t believe it, ask yourself, where’s the rabbit and where’s humane AI? That bandwagon.
Prakash Sangam:
Cool. All right. So folks, that’s all you have for now. I hope you found this discussion informative and useful. If so, please hit like and subscribe to the podcast on whatever platform you’re listening this on. I’ll be back soon with another episode, putting light on another interesting tech subject.
Bye-bye for now.
