CES 2015

Ever since Tim Cook unveiled the Apple Watch last September, it’s been one disappointment after another as far as I’m concerned. Apple’s first wearable won’t come in the minimalist form factor of the fitness bracelets I love. Worse yet, the launch version of the fashion-forward device will lack GPS, suffer from underwhelming battery life and fail to offer truly native third-party apps.

For the first time, I realized I would not be buying an Apple product when it first hit the market. “It’s not worth lining up for,” I told my dad when he asked what I thought after the Apple Watch’s big reveal.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Apple Watch’s launch day, which is coming sometime this spring. And I’m not talking about the previously unthinkable — an Apple fan calling the Microsoft Band the best smartwatch on the planet. No, I’m talking about wading through an ungodly sea of really bad smartwatches at International CES earlier this month and seeing indisputable proof of just how innovative and disruptive Apple Watch actually will be.

This week: Optical zoom and Force Touch rumored for the iPhone 6s, autonomous future-cars chauffeur us about, and we’re back from Vegas with a full report on the best gadgets, technology and trends from the 2015 International CES. And for a small fee, we cover your enemies in an explosion of spectacular glitter. Seriously.

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Full show notes ahead!

The year is 2018. After a long day at work, you pull into your driveway, whip out your iPhone 10 Plus and say, “Siri, I’m home.”

Your garage door opens silently, beckoning you to enter the ultra-connected smart home of the future.

As you walk in, your lights turn on. The wife used to get on you about leaving the lights on, but her nagging feels like a distant memory now. Your thermostat cools everything down to a comfortable 69 degrees. Knowing that you pulled into the driveway two minutes ago, your oven has started preheating itself. You usually fix dinner for yourself on Thursdays, so it’s time for frozen pizza.

LAS VEGAS — Walk the halls of the massive International CES trade show and you’ll be bombarded by an outrageous number of pitches for products with radical new features.

You can glimpse the shiny happy future of consumer electronics at the show, although some of the innovations on display are clearly destined for the dustbin of gadget history.

At the biggest booths, reps for big companies like Sony and Samsung — but, sadly, not Apple — talk up the latest additions to their product lines. At smaller booths, inventors show off prototypes for products that may not ever roll off an assembly line. There’s a nonstop blitz of “world’s first” products.

It’s impossible to see everything, but it’s a blast trying. Here are Cult of Mac’s picks for the best of CES 2015, from Lightning-enabled headphones and massive TVs to drones and self-adjusting belts.

LAS VEGAS — The iPhone is the most popular camera in the world. But it still sucks at flash photography.

Knog, the Austrialian company that makes those kickass bike lights, wants to make your nighttime iPhone pics a little bit better this year: Its newest lighting revelation is called Expose, and it’s a super-handy iPhone flash that’s also super-bright.

Expose is bright in more ways than one. Its accompanying iPhone app lets users blast light in photo and video modes, with flash, strobe or continuous settings. You can adjust the white balance and brightness, and the device weighs so little you’ll barely notice it’s in your pocket.

LAS VEGAS — The problem with the state of smartwatches, beyond the sucky software, is that they’re all ugly. The Apple Watch might very well be the first wearable that not only works, but looks good too, although we won’t know for sure until the finished product is on our wrists this spring.

There were dozens and dozens of smartwatches displayed on the sprawling show floor at International CES last week, but the only one that looked good enough to adorn my wrist was the new Withings Activité Pop.

It doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles of fancier watches like the Samsung Galaxy Gear, but it’s not your average dumb watch either. And for now, just a smidgen smarter is smart enough.

LAS VEGAS — Ata Ghofrani cut down on smoking and finally quit during the holidays. The only glitch was a New Year’s Eve party, which triggered a “huge spike” in his otherwise fairly smooth reduction schedule.

Ghofrani used his own invention — Quitbit, the world’s first “smart” lighter — to monitor his smoking and set a daily “budget” of cancer sticks that decreased every day.

“The key for me was to know how many cigarettes I budgeted to smoke a day and how many I had left,” he wrote in a blog post detailing his progress.

The Quitbit uses the same psychology as fitness trackers. If you can monitor it, you can manage it.

Hitting the gym with my girlfriend is an embarrassing affair. Not because she lifts almost as much as me, but because she’s so much better at it, with the all the right form and stuff.

“Move your knees farther apart. No, no, no. Push on the balls of your feet.”

It gets tedious as she makes sure I use the proper technique every single time, but her gripes and coaching are about to get replaced by a new wearable called Gymwatch. It tracks all your movements in the gym to make sure you’re getting the most out of your lifting workouts.

LAS VEGAS — Tons of wearables at International CES promise to help you get better at everything from brushing your teeth to perfecting your golf swing, but the last place we expected someone to toss a sensor was into our socks.

Sensoria’s Fitness Socks are aimed at transforming you into a better, injury-free runner by embedding three sensor pads into the bottom of the sock that track your stride, cadence and speed while you’re running. Coupled with the Sensoria mobile app, runners can now get direct feedback on their running style to correct things like heel striking to help them dominate their next 10k.

LAS VEGAS — Apple Pay is cool, but what if you don’t have the latest iPhone 6? The Plastc Card might be for you.

Plastc is a chameleon-like electronic card that stores up to 20 cards — debit, credit, gift and even security cards.

It’s the same size and shape as a regular card, but has a sharp and striking e-ink display. You simply swipe through the e-ink screen to choose the card you want, and swipe the mag stripe through the reader.

Instead of carrying 20 cards in your wallet, you carry just one.

LAS VEGAS — Laptop docks aren’t usually the sexiest things in the world, but the latest hardware from Henge Docks could be considered somewhat titillating.

Henge’s upcoming horizontal docking station is a beauty. Its sleek, metallic profile looks like an extension of Apple’s unibody MacBook design. But this thing doesn’t only have good looks; it boasts robust port expansion, helpful cable management and automatic docking.

A small company based in San Francisco, Henge Docks is already known for its vertical MacBook dock and Gravitas dock for iOS devices. Customers clamored for a horizontal MacBook dock that didn’t require a secondary display, and the finalized version is being displayed for the first time at International CES here this week.

LAS VEGAS — If shedding some body fat is one of your New Year’s resolutions, you’re probably like me and looking for all the high-tech help you can get.

Activity trackers are great at logging exercise, but if you want to measure the actual progress your muscles are making, check out the Skulpt Aim — an iPod-size device that measures your body fat percentage.

The Skulpt Aim uses electroanalysis to not only determine how much excess fat you’re carrying around, but also your muscle quality. Just spritz a little water on the muscle you want to test, press the device firmly against your muscle, and within a few seconds, Aim spits out your score.

LAS VEGAS — Hearing aids aren’t sexy, so a lot of journalists here at International CES breezed right by ReSound’s booth.

The Danish company has been in the hearing aid business for 75 years, and launched the first iPhone-connected hearing aid at CES last year. Now the company is a back with a full lineup of iPhone-compatible LiNX hearing aids. The devices address the whole range of hearing loss, from the mild to severe.

As I approach 50, I’m wondering if I need a pair myself, so I went to check them out. I was impressed. Connecting a hearing aid to an iPhone adds a lot of very useful functionality.

LAS VEGAS — In a sea of iPhone cases and other Apple-related gizmos, one would expect to find at least a few Apple Watch accessories at CES.

Sure, the Watch itself won’t come out for probably a few more months, but we already know what it looks like and a lot about how its apps will work. Where are the companies looking to hitch their wagons to Apple’s next big thing?

Out of the 3,679 exhibitors spread across the 2.06 million square feet of show floor at International CES this year, there is only one Apple Watch accessory, and it’s an unfinished prototype.

LAS VEGAS — iDevices’ first HomeKit-compatible product will be a simple on-off switch that turns your iPhone into a remote control for lamps and appliances.

It’s name is simple too: Switch.

The $49.99 rectangular device plugs into an outlet. You plug a standard electrical device like a lamp or stereo into its convenient side outlet, and then you can turn that device on and off remotely. Switch comes in plain white, although a colored band of lights can be programmed to glow in custom colors to brighten up a dark hallway.

“You can change it to any color you like,” said Dan Cepa, iDevices’ senior director of sales, during CES International.

LAS VEGAS — Monitoring diabetes can be a pain (literally). Keeping track of your loved one’s diabetes is even harder, especially if you’re trying to ensure your tech-illiterate grandmother’s blood-sugar levels aren’t spiking.

Now you’ll finally be able to monitor all their vital stats from your iPhone, even if grandma’s not using one too.

iHealth revealed its new iHealth Gateway collection of devices at International CES here this week. The line of products allow loved ones or doctors to remotely monitor personal health stats for senior citizens who eschew iOS devices. All grandma and grandpa have to do is prick their finger with the supported blood-glucose monitor, and the Gateway hub will beam the data to their caretaker’s device. No more worries about whether they’re keeping up with their meds.

LAS VEGAS — Drones are everywhere at the International CES show. You can’t walk though the South Hall without hearing the feverish buzz of quadrocopter wings luring people to their booths.

Most of the new drones we’ve seen are either too expensive for normal people, or they’re cheap and lack compelling features. But after hours of searching we’ve found the one drone you should pay attention to in 2015: The Hexo+.

On the outside, Hexo+ doesn’t look too different from other drones, but it packs a killer “auto-follow” feature that will allow budding drone photographers to capture epic aerial videos without needing a dedicated pilot to frame each shot.

LAS VEGAS — Your iPhone captures great imagery, but sometimes the built-in zoom just isn’t enough. An ingenious gadget that quickly connects smartphones to almost any optical device gives your everyday camera superpowers.

The Carson Universal is an incredibly simple idea, but it delivers some pretty astonishing results. You can use it to connect your smartphone to telescopes, binoculars, microscopes, spotting scopes or almost any other optical device with a rounded eyepiece. Instead of buying a specialized, device-specific adapter, it’s a one-size-fits-all optical attachment.

“It kind of opens up the possibilities,” said Michelle Hyers, the engineer who designed the Carson Universal.

LAS VEGAS — Want to avoid gingivitis and tooth decay? There’s an app for that. More than one, actually, and they work with Bluetooth-equipped toothbrushes to help ensure you’re properly cleaning your choppers.

The app for Oral-B’s electric Bluetooth toothbrushes is designed to develop good brushing habits and keep your teeth healthy.

“We have a product that will work — if you use it,” Oral-B rep Kris Parlett told Cult of Mac during International CES.

LAS VEGAS — Of all the amazing technology on show here at International CES, the most surprising so far is Hewlett-Packard’s weird Sprout, a multitalented Franken-puter that looks like a ton of fun.

The HP Sprout is a touchscreen computer married to a multitouch pad, with a projector/camera/3-D scanner peering overhead. It looks like a bad prop from a Lego version of War of the Worlds.

I’d seen the press releases when it launched last October and had pretty low expectations. It just looked too weird. But I was genuinely delighted to see it in action.

LAS VEGAS — Your iPhone is really great at finding places to eat, recipes to cook and stores to buy food at, but when it comes to actually analyzing the things that go in your mouth, it’s not very futuristic. That’s where Consumer Physics comes in with its molecular analyzer called SCiO that brings Star Trek-like tech to your pocket.

SCiO is a tiny spectrometer similar to the giant ones found in laboratories that are used to analyze the molecular makeup of objects. Only instead of pumping out nothing but nerdy scientific facts, SCiO was designed to help iPhone users analyze everyday objects, so you can discover things like how much fat is in a piece of cheese or whether a watermelon is ripe.

“Your iPhone can tell you what song is playing on the radio, but when it comes to telling you the nutritional value of food it’s kind of clueless,” says Consumer Physics’ CEO Dror Sharon. “With SCiO we’re encouraging explorers to help us on our mission to map the physical world.”

LAS VEGAS — Bryan Chaffin loves his Casper mattress.

“I don’t even know where to start,” effused the Mac Observer executive vice president. “It’s the most comfortable mattress I’ve ever slept on. It was dead-easy to set up. It’s just incredibly comfortable.”

Chaffin is a satisfied customer of Casper, a New York startup shaking up the tired old mattress industry. Casper is doing everything differently, from the design of its all-foam mattress to the way it sells and ships direct to customers.

LAS VEGAS — Nobody wants to get hacked like Jennifer Lawrence’s iCloud account. Everyone, including Apple, is pushing two-factor authentication in the wake of the high-profile hack that exposed dozens of celebrities nude selfies, but verifying an account login with a code sent to your phone is a total pain.

In the not-so-distant future, we might all be storing two-factor authentication on our keychains.

Yubico is already providing eight out of 10 Silicon Valley companies with a tiny USB dongle called YubiKey that securely verifies an employee’s online identity. You just plug it into a computer and tap it when it’s time to log in. Now that Gmail has started supporting YubiKey on the front end, anyone can use it as the second verification step for getting into their inbox.

LAS VEGAS — It’s hard to say what’s most amazing about Elio Motors’ three-wheeled car: its sexy frame, its extreme fuel efficiency or its jaw-dropping $6,800 price tag.

That princely sum — a little less than a 12-core Mac Pro costs — gets you a sleek two-seater that looks like something you’d see in a sci-fi flick. It’s got two wheels up front, one in back and a built-in holder for your iPad.

And on the International CES show floor here, Elio’s got a team of breezy boosters who tout its many forward-looking features with the quick-witted humor of the best car salesmen.

“For $6,800, we ought to charge you for the air in the tires,” Elio Motors rep Don Harris told Cult of Mac when we asked if the iPad was included in the purchase price.

LAS VEGAS — I hate hunting. Not because I’m morally opposed to needlessly slaughtering animals, but because I’m a horrible shot.

I couldn’t hit a deer even if it was only 100 yards away, which is why I need TrackingPoint’s Internet-connected rifles. They boast the same type of precision-guided technology that fighter jets use to blast targets from miles away, while letting your family and friends watch the slaughter from the comfort of their couches.