The World's Biggest Consumer Electronics Show Turns 50: You Used to See the Future Here — Now It's Just Concepts and Shopping

Fifty years on, CES feels more like an ordinary trade show.

Fifty years ago today, the idea of consumer electronics really began to spread.

On January 6, 1967, about a hundred companies gathered at the first CES, bringing the most advanced technology of the day — mainly color television.

In the 50 years since, CES has never once skipped a year, and it keeps growing. This year it drew 3,800 exhibitors, 165,000 attendees, and 6,500 media outlets from around the world.

But walk through these expensively built halls and you can't help feeling let down.

The main floor has barely changed from one or two years ago. The best spots still belong to Samsung, LG, and Sony, and what they are showing is still televisions — thinner, bigger, sharper televisions.

There is not much new left to say about a television. Take Samsung's flagship QLED set: the main improvement is a new set of slogans. The screen has a high resolution, so it's called Q 8K; the colors don't wash out when you look from the side, so it's called Q Viewing Angle; you can install apps on it, so it's called Q Smart.

TCL, which sold more than a million televisions in the Americas last year, was here again pushing its televisions. Huawei gave a keynote, announcing a deal with Amazon to sell the Mate 9 in the US. Xiaomi's vice president of international business also walked through his company.

Cameras, televisions, smartphones — these are all products you have long since gotten used to, and none of them show signs of a real breakthrough.

Nothing new stays at CES. Last year the biggest crowds went to virtual reality: the consumer version of Facebook's Oculus VR headset was making its first appearance. We stood in line more than two hours for a seven-minute demo. But Oculus didn't sell, and this year it has no booth at all.

Over the past five years, most of the new technologies shown at CES have come and gone the way virtual reality did. Drones, wearables, and 3D printing all failed to open a new market.

It isn't only that new things fail to stay. Technology companies are now having trouble even describing the future.

Last year Intel put on the biggest keynote. The chipmaker had invested in and acquired a string of drone and robotics companies, and in a presentation that ran nearly two hours it showed more than a dozen possible uses for them.

But the spending didn't pay off, and Intel is now reorganizing internally. This year's biggest keynote came from another chipmaker, Nvidia. There were few demonstrations to go with its account of the future — it was mostly talk.

CES looks more and more like an ordinary trade show.

Rebadging has become normal. Polaroid showed action cameras, phones, tablets, Windows computers, 3D printers — and among all of them you couldn't find a single camera app Polaroid made itself. It was as if the company had shipped the whole of Shenzhen over.

The Sands hall, meant to draw startups, is about the cheapest space at CES: 80,000 yuan rents you a stall of a few square meters. Its exhibitors have gone from startups to stalls straight out of Huaqiangbei. Phone cases, earphones, and charging cables are the mainstream now, and they really do all come from Shenzhen and Guangdong.

Some companies didn't bother with a booth at all, renting hotel meeting rooms nearby to line up sales instead.

To be fair, CES has been a trade show since 1967. But for its first forty years, it was a trade show where you could catch sight of where technology would be five years out.

CES was born in an age when products changed the world. The Whole Earth Catalog, which Steve Jobs was still talking about decades later, appeared in 1968 — and what that counterculture magazine mostly did was review products.

In the 1960s, a group of Japanese manufacturers used CES to push color television to the public. A few years later the video recorder arrived and broke television's dependence on the broadcast schedule, making it normal to watch movies and shows at home.

Later Sony brought the CD player, and Nintendo brought the Famicom and the Game Boy. Music and gaming both went mainstream here.

Then came personal computers, handheld computers, smartphones — one electronic product after another spread to the world from this show.

These products were not just goods that sold. They shaped human culture. They were the way in to film, television, music, and software; they brought the mobile internet into our lives; after the financial crisis, they drove new growth.

They were part of how technology pushed the world forward. That growth has now stopped. This is not CES's problem — new products still appear, they just don't stay.

Apple and Google, which aren't on the show floor, haven't managed any further breakthrough either.

Forty-odd years of electronics changing the world have come to a halt, and no one knows for how long.

From the First CES in 1967, This Was Where You Saw the Future

In 1967, the first CES, held in New York, was a side event of the Chicago Music Show, which by then had already become a place for manufacturers to show consumer electronics products and technology.

The organizing committee limited exhibits to a few categories — televisions, radios, phonographs — so the stars of the show were electronic entertainment products, and the main draw was the debut of integrated circuits for televisions.

Panasonic and Sharp brought black-and-white televisions; Packard Bell and Motorola's subsidiary Quasar showed color sets; the hotel halls held everything from $8 radios to $15,000 home stereo units for attendees to look over and discuss.

Motorola was the largest communications technology company of the day, and it was then preparing the communications for the first moon landing in 1969. Motorola chairman Robert Galvin gave the opening address at that first CES.

By 1968 and 1969, CES had grown a little larger and had loosened the range of products it would accept.

The organizers rented three New York hotels as exhibition space, and exhibitors turned up with electronics as avant-garde as radios small enough to wear on the wrist, the Portable Executive Telephone, and stereo radio headphones. Watching people wearing those radio headphones, the New York Times said they looked like "people from Mars".

Among all those products, televisions were still shown the most. Sony did not exhibit its technology at CES in those years, but it did bring advanced color sets to the US.

In October 1968, Sony launched the KV-1310 for the Japanese market, its first color television built on cathode ray tube (CRT) technology, and patented the tube under the name Trinitron. In 1969 Sony brought the Trinitron to Europe and America, starting a product life that would run 40 years.

Most competitors used spherical picture tubes in those early years. The first Trinitron curved horizontally but ran straight vertically, which earned it the name "cylindrical picture tube." The picture looked flatter and more natural for it, and distorted less than a spherical tube's, whether you watched head-on or from an angle.

The American television market at the time was still mostly black-and-white. The technology had not changed much in years, so people had no reason to replace their sets. Only in the late 1960s, when mature color televisions arrived, did the market wake up and television sales start growing again. Three years later, half of American households had a color set.

In the 1970s, Video Recorders and Home Game Consoles Sent CES Into Its First Growth Spurt

In the early 1970s, CES was still finding its feet: a trade show with no mainstream press coverage, and one that had not yet settled how many times a year to run or where.

None of that stopped its first decade of fast growth. In the 1970s its exhibitor count passed 300, double the 1960s. What made CES start to matter was that three products shown there in the 1970s went on to shape the world of their time.

The first was the U-matic, the home video cassette recorder (VCR) Sony introduced at CES in 1970.

The U-matic was a metal box that recorded what was playing on your television. Inside was a tuner that picked up the broadcast signal, and it could be set to start recording at a given time. That meant you could come home and watch a program played back from tape; one tape held up to 60 minutes and could be reused.

The recorder let the film and television business step outside the broadcaster's schedule, freeing content from a purely time-based way of reaching people. The movie and TV rental business Netflix built over the past twenty years started on this format too.

Next, in January 1975, Atari showed the Pong console at the Winter CES. Pong was the first time a game console entered the home.

It was a small box with two joysticks that you plugged into a television. At launch it came with a single game, also called Pong — by today's standards a very crude tennis match: a pure black background, white rectangles for the paddles, and a moving white square for the ball. Apple's founder Steve Jobs was at the time still writing video games for Atari.

Controlling the picture on your own television, and playing against another person, was a novel way to play then. So Pong took off right after CES. Over the 1975 Christmas holiday, Pong sold 150,000 units.

Atari's own management mistakes kept it from becoming the biggest home console company of the next two decades. But Pong's success pushed other game companies to build similar home television game machines — among them Nintendo, which later made the NES and the Game Boy.

Jobs, who had helped Atari make games, went on in April 1976, not long after Pong shipped, to found Apple with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne and go into personal computers. That was still a minority pursuit, so it did not appear at CES.

In the 1970s, the electronic watch also opened a new era.

A watch was then a precision instrument, and a byword for expensive handwork.

Even a very ordinary mechanical watch usually sold for more than $100, and the Pulsar, which used light-emitting diodes for its display, cost $2,000 in 1972.

Texas Instruments brought the Starburst, the earliest liquid-crystal electronic watch, to CES in 1977 for under $20.

Texas Instruments worked with department stores and discount chains to get the watches everywhere, and since almost no digital watch could reach that price, TI sold $18 million of electronic watches that year alone.

In 1978, CES formally began holding two shows a year — summer in Chicago, winter in Las Vegas.

By the 1980s, CES Was Still Mainly About Home Appliances

The 1980s were the early days of the personal computer. The most popular machine on the market was still the Apple II, which Apple had launched in 1977 and which the computer industry widely credited with creating the home computer market; by the 1980s it had sold several million units.

Commodore's early computers, such as the PET 2001, came out around the same time as the Apple II. The difference was that the Apple II was expensive and powerful while the PET 2001 was cheap and weak — $1,298 and $795, respectively. The Apple II could display color images and handle graphics and sound; the PET 2001 showed black-and-white text and needed a cassette tape to play sound.

Then 1982 changed things.

The Commodore 64 was shown at CES and went on sale that August for $595. It could display images and play sound, and at under $600 ordinary people could afford it.

Within a few years it sold 22 million units, more than any other PC model of the period, and more than 6,000 games were written for the platform.

Two years later Commodore's Amiga home computer — sold on high-resolution color graphics, a graphical user interface, multitasking, and four-channel stereo sound — was also shown at CES.

IBM, decades into the commercial computer business, began in the 1980s to take the new personal computer industry seriously. The moment the IBM PC launched, IBM used its relationships with corporate customers to pull away from Apple and take over the personal computer market.

The IBM PC ran on Intel's x86 hardware architecture and Microsoft's MS-DOS operating system. It used an open architecture, which let other manufacturers build and sell compatible hardware and software.

And it was precisely because IBM adopted open hardware and software standards that IBM was not the one to profit from this new trend. Microsoft and Intel, which began coming to CES in the 1980s, were.

Each set the standard for one half of the personal computer, software and hardware. As spreadsheets, word processors, and email appeared and spread, the personal computer stopped being a toy and became an office tool. That gave software developers a market big enough to work in — and took most of the industry's profit away.

The Nintendo NES, shown at CES in 1985, was the most important gaming product of its time.

That October 18 the NES went on sale in New York and succeeded quickly. In February 1986, Nintendo released the NES and 15 games across the US. By 1988, people who watched the game business said the NEC cartridge market had grown bigger than the entire computer software market put together.

Nintendo remade the industry on the strength of its themes and the way its games felt to play, and made gaming stay for good. The Super Mario Bros. series, born in the 1980s, was a pioneer of side-scrolling games; The Legend of Zelda, which appeared around the same time, made battery-backed saved games popular.

In 1989 Nintendo launched the Game Boy handheld. Two weeks after its Japanese release, all 300,000 units in stock were gone; in the US the entire initial run of 40,000 sold out on the first day. The Game Boy is still the best-selling handheld console in the world.

Personal consumer electronics moved fast through the 1980s, but the hottest company of the moment, Apple, chose the 1984 Super Bowl to advertise the Macintosh — which tells you where the mass market was. CES was still not a truly public show.

In the 1990s, Apple Comes to CES for the First Time — But It's Already Microsoft's World

The first thing the 1990s witnessed was Apple's decline as a personal computer company.

1992 was the last year Apple attended CES. Apple CEO John Sculley brought the company's newest handheld computer (PDA), the Newton, to the show's opening keynote.

Apple hoped the Newton would completely change the shape of the personal computer: a tablet-like PDA with a stylus that could read your handwriting, get online, and handle simple scheduling.

But the Newton read handwriting so badly that people mocked it: "Why would you use a $700 tablet to replace a $5 notebook and pen?"

In the end another PDA, the Palm Pilot, beat it.

Palm was a computer company founded only in 1993 — the same year CES began opening to the general public, at $100 a ticket.

Three years later Palm released the Palm Pilot, which used Palm's own Graffiti handwriting input system and could read handwritten characters quickly and accurately.

The PDA's main users were business people, and the Palm Pilot became a huge success on accurate handwriting recognition, simple contacts, calendar, and notepad features built for work, and a price of $290 — less than half the Newton's.

Within eighteen months of launch the Palm Pilot sold a million units, faster than the video recorder or the color television had ever sold.

Just as Palm was taking over the PDA business, Microsoft had already taken over computer software completely.

As early as 1991, Windows held more than 80% of the market, and Microsoft's annual sales passed $1 billion for the first time.

The three main Office applications — Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — were each climbing fast. Around 1994, all three passed 50% market share.

In 1995, Microsoft's Windows 95 paired with Intel's Pentium processor, and the faster, cheaper personal computer finally arrived, with a comfortable interface and powerful Office tools. Windows 95 also set off a boom in the PC market, and other hardware changed with it.

Bill Gates became a fixture on the CES keynote stage from then on. His personal fortune reached $12.9 billion in 1995, making him the youngest person ever to be the richest in the world.

In 1998, CES dropped its twice-a-year format and became a single winter show in Las Vegas.

In 2007, an iPhone Launched Outside CES Beat the Microsoft Empire

Two important things happened at CES in the 2000s. The first was the SD card, which let us keep photos, music, and other digital content on a small, thin sliver. The SD card is also seen as one of the earliest forms of solid-state storage.

At CES 2000, Panasonic showed an SD card slotted into a palm-sized digital camcorder, and Toshiba showed one in a portable music player. The memory card we take for granted today was, back then, called the future of memory cards.

The second was that in the early 2000s Microsoft began sketching a picture of personal computing and the internet beyond the PC.

In 2000, Microsoft announced a strategic shift at CES that Bill Gates called "Consumer Electronics Plus": the MSN chat tool would go onto phones; television would not be spared either, with Philips brought in to build WebTV, a television running Windows.

In 2001, Microsoft's game console arrived too — it held a launch for the Xbox at CES. It shipped with the shooter Halo, which made the Xbox a hit.

In those years Microsoft wanted to build an operating system for every device with a screen. Besides televisions and phones, it made Car.NET, an in-car entertainment system; the Windows Mobile operating system; and Microsoft Reader, an operating system for handheld computers. Seeing how popular music players like the iPod had become, Microsoft also built an MP3 player, the Zune — boxy, admittedly.

But the real turn came at CES 2007. On January 7, Bill Gates took the opening keynote stage for the eleventh time.

The theme that year was Connected Experience. Gates said that as connection speeds rose and electronic devices multiplied, people would increasingly want to reach their music, photos, games, and other content on different devices — and that Microsoft, and its software system Windows Vista, would go on being the hub that connected them.

But what stayed with the reporters in the room that year wasn't at CES at all. It was the first iPhone, unveiled two days after Gates's keynote, on January 9, at Macworld.

Shortly after the iPhone went on sale in 2007, BlackBerry founder Mike Lazaridis took one apart and said: "They put a Mac in it."

The iPhone was a personal computer shrunk to the size of a phone. To make it usable, Apple introduced the App Store and a multi-touch way of interacting suited to a small screen, and set off a boom in smartphones.

That success produced a run of companies that wanted to take on the iPhone and called themselves — or were called — "iPhone killers" and "iPad killers." A few of the better-known ones:

• 2009: the Palm Pre, challenging the iPhone
• 2011: the Motorola Xoom, challenging the iPad
• 2014: the Nokia Lumia, Microsoft's challenge to the iPhone

Not one of them worked. Palm went under; Motorola was sold, first to Google and then to Lenovo; Nokia's phone business was bought by Microsoft and has now licensed its brand to a startup, HMD.

The Last Five Years of CES Are a History of Technology Hunting for the Next iPhone and Failing

No one in technology talks about iPhone killers anymore. Instead each company is looking for its own next "iPhone" to grow on — Apple's own attempts being the watch, the big-screen iPad, and iPhones in three screen sizes.

You can see the change in the past five years of CES.

In 2011, the hottest products at CES were Android tablets: more than 100 new models were on display, plenty of them from big manufacturers like Acer, Asus, Lenovo, and Samsung.

3D printers were another star of CES 2011; large stretches of the floor were given over to them, every company hoping its printer would become the manufacturing device on people's desks.

MakerBot, a pioneer of home 3D printing, first appeared at CES in 2010. By the next year it had sold 3,500 printers and raised $10 million. Two years after that it sold to Stratasys Incorporated for $403 million, a deal that was read for a while as a sign that hardware was hot again.

After that, drones, wearables, and smart home devices took turns as the star of CES.

In 2011, the drone maker Parrot showed two toy drones, and DJI showed its new eight-rotor drone, the S1000.

In 2015, then Samsung Electronics president and co-CEO Boo-Keun Yoon said at CES: "Within five years, 100% of Samsung's products will be Internet of Things products." To get there, Samsung not only unveiled a morning's worth of washing machines, robot vacuums, and quantum-dot televisions under a "smart living" theme — even Yoon's keynote was titled "Internet of Things Is for You."

"Future=Delivered" was the slogan of CES 2015. Among the rows of booths, nothing looked closer to the future than head-mounted virtual reality (VR) gear — users in huge helmets out of a space-marine movie, leaning back in their chairs with their mouths open.

Virtual reality was still the star in 2016. Two days into the show, with the retail version of the Oculus Rift three months from shipping, the Oculus booth still had three long lines around it. A QDaily reporter stood for two hours at midday to get a seven-minute demo.

Others felt the same way. Aaron Shea, a software developer waiting in that line, told QDaily he had booked too late for an event in Boston and missed his chance there; this time he had taken a connecting flight to CES largely for Oculus.

At CES 2017, Oculus is not here. The headset has been on sale a year and still has not sold a million units. The one successful virtual reality product is Sony's PSVR, which works more as a console accessory — experiencing another world, or commercial uses, were never what Sony had in mind.

Wearables no longer have a hall of their own; the companies that showed them have scattered into small medical and industrial markets. 3D printing has shrunk to one small corner.

You Still Can't Live Without Consumer Electronics, But They No Longer Push the World Forward

CES is still the most important stage in consumer electronics. The companies that once tried to beat the iPhone, and the new companies trying to find the next one, all show up here.

It's just that none of their products has become the next trend.

Nor have Apple and Google, which hold their own events, found one. Apple's work on watches, touchscreen computers, and cars has not produced another iPhone. Most of the hardware announced at Google I/O is dead.

Technology keeps advancing and products keep getting easier to use. But they are becoming as everyday as the power grid, and no longer a force that can deliver big growth.

You can't live without electricity, but you probably don't care how power station technology is coming along.

Electronic products — or rather the technology they stand for — look more and more like a power station.

They still matter. But once you're used to them, they no longer excite anyone, and they no longer drive growth.

Let's hope this is only temporary.

Cover image from The Verge