Why CES 2021 was full of business laptops and Chromebooks

This story is part of CES, where our editors will present the latest news and the hottest gadgets from CES 2021 entirely virtual.

When we look back at the virtual CES 2021, let’s think mainly about what didn’t happen. No memorable meals in Las Vegas, no celebrity sightings at the convention center, no crazy demonstrations of fantastic new prototypes. Instead, what we saw on our browser screens was mainly a procession of practical products, designed not to inspire or delight, but only to help us spend the next few months wearing masks, working at home and waiting for our turn on the line. vaccine.

Most years at CES, I’m excited to show you the latest conceptual pieces and gaming laptops, or talking about trends I see coming up, like flexible screens or secondary monitors. If I talk about simple corporate laptops, it’s usually like an afterthought. They are generally not very attached to the Las Vegas rah-rah emotion.

Then 2020 happened. It turns out that the business laptop folks were actually the most important people in the room now, and their products dominated at CES 2021. Some of the biggest PC makers, including Dell and HP, announced primarily commercial laptops, adding and adjusting features for the semi-permanent crowd of work at home. I don’t think I ever thought about Latitude and EliteBook laptops so much at CES. But the laptops that make it easier to work were one of the big themes of the show, along with some other prominent topics.

Just business

Because of the long timeline required to develop new computer hardware, it’s not as if PC manufacturers have a whole new line of COVID-era machines to show us. It’s more of a shift in emphasis, taking business laptops already under development and pushing them to the forefront, adjusting features and pointing out that these machines have the best webcams and microphones and the most advanced security features, than home offices in time. integral need.

Dell added some recycled bioplastic from trees to some Latitude models and best webcams for others. HP made a commercial version of the very smart two-in-one Folio design and added a big webcam update for Dragonfly Max. Lenovo new X1 Titanium it’s the thinnest two-in-one in the company, but it also has a higher 3: 2 aspect ratio screen to make the spreadsheet easier. Yes I think.

Kids and Chromebooks

Chromebooks tend to have a decent showing at CES, but again, this year brought them up. So many remote learning students boarded the Chromebook train during 2020 that the proportion of laptops per family member was very close to 1: 1. Families that could have children sharing a single laptop or that children borrowed from their parents’ machines were forced to go out and buy one for each remote student.

Chromebooks won because they were almost universally a cheaper and easier to use alternative to Windows and MacBooks laptops, and they work easily with the tools that most school systems use (Google Classroom, Epic, Khan Academy).

Acer Spin 514 Chromebook, for example, offered Gorilla Glass and some mil-spec resistance features that, frankly, many students need. AND Samsung has cut the price of its Galaxy Chromebook 30-50% compared to last year’s model, keeping it especially sharp.

New ideas for two screens

Last year, at CES 2020, we saw many incredible and incredible prototypes and concepts, from laptops with foldable screens to Alienware gaming PC (and much like Switch). This year, things were more practical in general, but we also saw some more sophisticated devices. And after years of missed attempts, dual-screen laptops can finally be real and useful to people.

Asus’ latest review of ZenBook Duo concept really surprised me. It has a second bigger screen, with a smarter placement, but most importantly, it found something really useful to do with it. With the integration with the Adobe application, I loved using jog wheels and shortcut buttons in Premiere and Photoshop, while recovering the screen space on the main screen.

I also loved the larger and more useful E Ink screen on Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 2 i (that’s a tricky name), because the back of your laptop’s cover is, frankly, a lot of underutilized space. Here, it becomes an E Ink screen, like a Kindle, that can hold your calendar or some notes or even an email inbox from the front, and allow simple notes, all with minimal battery consumption. The integration of the current Kindle app is not particularly smart, but it looks like it is some adjustments from being a really useful airplane laptop.

Ironically, the second most ubiquitous screen in years, Apple’s OLED touch bar may be on the brink of extinction, according to a recent rumor.

Games, I think?

My favorite part of CES in most years is the rush to new PC gaming hardware and accessories. This year, it’s hard to be very excited about this, with both PS5 and Xbox Series X still so shiny and new.

That said, new Nvidia laptop GPUs (the 3000 series, first introduced on desktops in 2020) is coming to gaming laptops such as the Acer Triton 300 and Lenovo Legion 7 Slim, and most of these new systems are surprisingly subtle. In part, this is because the new and more efficient GPU and CPU hardware allows for thinner, less fan designs – previously, you kind of needed big lights and shiny alien heads to cover up the fact that your gaming laptop had to be the size of a compact car.

Even now, a modestly priced gaming laptop is more powerful and has more future performance overhead than new living room game consoles, but it’s also hard to beat $ 500 on next-generation console hardware now. In the coming years, as the PS5 and Xbox age in their fixed configurations, PC games will return to the forefront.

That is what the CES looked like to me, at least. For a little while it may look like 100 years from now, see Scott’s vision at CES 2121 here.