Rabbit, Ballie, and the other gadgets of CES 2024

The best gadgets at CES are the ones you’d never see coming. Not the iterative updates, where everything gets a little brighter and a little faster but nothing fundamentally changes. No, we like the E Ink toilets and the crab-walking cars and the rolling projectors that show you what’s inside your fridge. Do you need all these things? Does anyone? Will they ever go on sale? Who knows?! That’s the fun of CES.

On this episode of The Vergecast, recorded from the Kia Connected Home right in the middle of the Las Vegas Convention Center parking lot, we discuss all the most important gadget stories from this year’s show. We talk about the Rabbit R1, which was easily the surprise hit of the show. We discuss Ballie, Samsung’s adorable robot companion, and the tough week it had giving demos. We talk Qi2 and Wi-Fi 7 and the other standards shaping the future of gadgets. And finally, we talk about the future of cars, and what it means that the inside of the car suddenly seems to matter way more than the outside.

To read more about this year’s CES, check out the StoryStream with all our coverage from the show. Here are a few links related to what we discuss on this episode in particular, starting with Rabbit and Ballie:

On the new and growing standards at the show:

And on the cars we saw this year: