A year after the Las Vegas halls emptied and the glow of booth lights dimmed, many of CES 2025’s buzziest products have either become everyday gear, expensive curiosities, or vaporware you can only find via gray-market listings. I revisited the winners and near-winners—laptops, robots, rings, and even a salty electric spoon—to see which ideas survived the trek from press room applause to shipping cartons.
Winners that made the leap
Some picks actually lived up to the hype. Lenovo’s Legion Tab Gen 3 transformed its on-floor promise—a compact 8.8-inch gaming tablet with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and a vapor chamber thermal design—into an attractive $389 device that reviewers praised for punchy performance and a 144Hz screen. Similarly, LG’s G5 OLED didn’t just wow at CES; professional testing later ranked it among the brightest, most picture-perfect OLEDs available.
AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D emerged as a clear hardware win. Launched after the show, it dominated gaming benchmarks and kept a lead against Intel in many workloads, validating the chipmakers’ CES-stage bravado.
Not all success stories were headline-grabbing consumer boxes. Nvidia’s Cosmos—originally framed as a “world foundation model” at CES—morphed into a practical, open-source simulation platform and quickly found real engineering users in robotics and autonomous-vehicle teams. That kind of behind-the-scenes influence doesn’t trend on social, but it changes product roadmaps.
Hits that arrived… with caveats
A few products shipped but came with compromises. The Asus Zenbook A14 arrived as a slim, well-built ultraportable with great battery life and an attractive price, yet its Snapdragon X Plus-powered Copilot+ configuration felt underwhelming for heavy workloads. Some buyers loved its portability; others expected more CPU muscle for the price.
JBL’s Tour One M3 headphones reached market with the clever suitcase transmitter that lets you pull audio from airplane seats or older 3.5mm sources—useful for travel—alongside solid battery life and spatial sound. Unfortunately, tariffs nudged the price up after launch.
The Lenovo Legion Go S is instructive: the Windows model underperformed relative to expectations, but a later SteamOS variant unlocked smoother game performance, proving software choices matter as much as silicon. If you care about handheld PC gaming, follow the SteamOS line closely—Valve’s platform keeps evolving with the handheld space; Valve even added a low-power, display-off download mode recently to help portable users download on the go.
Prototypes that stayed prototypes (for now)
Not every striking demo survived contact with supply chains. MSI’s Project Zero X—a gorgeous, cable-free motherboard and case concept—remains mostly a trade-show artifact because its parts are too proprietary to scale. The Kirin Electric Salt Spoon, a lip-tingling gadget designed to amplify umami with a tiny electric current, attracted headlines but largely stayed regional and niche; English-language distribution was minimal.
Roborock’s Saros Z70, with its robotic arm, shipped fast but felt more like a first-gen novelty: capable in limited situations (hard floors, a handful of object types) and expensive for what it does. Some tech demos are better described as “aspirational” than “practical” right now.
Products that stumbled after launch
HMD’s OffGrid puck—an inexpensive satellite SOS puck for phones—showed promise but customers reported inconsistent connectivity and thin support, and the ongoing service fees dampened adoption, especially as carriers and phone makers expand native satellite emergency options.
Wearables also produced mixed results. Circular’s Ring 2 and Ozlo’s Sleepbuds both shipped but suffered from software and feature delays: laggy apps, slow syncing, or promised sleep-tracking features arriving late or incomplete.
Small companies that made real progress
Not every success is consumer-facing. Flint, a Singapore startup touting a safer, flexible-paper battery concept, quietly moved from prototypes to early production and announced collaborations with established device makers. Those quiet supply-chain wins are the sort of thing that quietly power bigger launches a year or two later.
Why CES still matters (even if companies don’t all ship)
CES isn’t just about products you can buy tomorrow. It’s an industry calendar that surfaces ideas—new form factors, simulation tools, and developer platforms—that eventually percolate into phones, factories, and cars. Case in point: AR wearables like the XReal One Pro found a practical niche as travel productivity gear, while Samsung and others continue to push XR strategies globally, indicating the category’s long game is far from finished.
Journalists and engineers still pack the same essential tools for the show—many carry a dependable MacBook or two for writing, testing, and editing on the move—but what people take home from CES this year is less about one hero device and more about cross-category ideas: better simulation stacks for robots, smarter integration in smart homes, and XR that actually solves a workflow problem.
If you scan CES 2026’s expanded awards lineup and the dozens of categories brands are chasing, the show remains a useful bellwether: the companies that pair realistic pricing, solid software support, and clear use cases are the ones that tend to move from booth demo to customer doorstep. The rest? They give the industry something provocative to argue about—until the next January rolls around and the floors light up again.