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CES 2025 has finally drawn to a close, and it’s been a cracker. We’ve interviewed people from dozens of companies, from startups to one of the largest in the world, and there has been one common thread: business technology that will make a genuine difference.
Here, let us take you on a short journey through CES 2025 via eight products that won our admiration. And our best of CES 2025 business technology awards.
“We believe that sound waves can be harvested to generate energy, much like solar or wind power,” Satish Jawalapersad, General Director at LV Energy told us. “The way it works is that we pick up on sound waves and vibration in the air – like those generated by heavy machinery for example – condense it and then convert it into electricity.”
LV Energy is currently working with factories and manufacturing facilities to create a proof of concept.
Sticking to our sustainable theme, Acer unveiled an update to its environmentally conscious Vero range with the Acer Aspire Vero 16. We got our hands on a sample whilst at the show, and it’s a great refinement on what went before. Acer has updated the styling and the internals, with Intel’s powerful Core Ultra 200H series inside.
The new Vero 16 will be available to buy from April, with US prices starting at $799.99.
This is an interesting one. For the first time in the brand’s history, this ThinkPad does not include a TrackPoint (aka a red nipple) in the middle of the keyboard, and Lenovo has also abandoned traditional black for a dark grey. Why? Because it wants to attract a new breed of buyer, and that means new styling.
The keyboard is the same quality as previous ThinkPads, using a scissor design that’s seen on the X1 Nano, but the keys themselves again have a more “modern” look. Something akin to the MacBook, which is very much what the ThinkPad X9 is gunning for.
Key specs? It comes with a choice of 14in or 15in OLED screens, features Core 2 Ultra 200V vPro processors, offers up to 2TB of storage and 32GB of RAM, includes two Thunderbolt 4 ports and supports Wi-Fi 7. The 14in version weighs 1.2kg, 15in 1.45kg.
They will go on sale in the US in February with starting prices of $1,399 and £1,549 respectively.
We can’t emphasise enough how much we like the HP Z2 Mini G1a. This takes advantage of AMD’s Ryzen AI Max PRO chips, also announced at CES 2025, which combine incredibly powerful CPU cores with impressive NPU abilities and ISV-certified graphics.
Perhaps most crucially for the target audience here, it uses a unified memory architecture. As Justine Sériès, Senior Product Manager for Z2 workstations, explains in the video above, this means you can dedicate up to 96GB of memory to the GPU. Memory peaks at 128GB.
There’s space for two 4TB M.2 2280 PCIe 4 cards inside, too, so storage should not be an issue despite this system’s compact dimensions (3.4 x 6.6 x 7.9in; 8.55 x 16.8 x 20cm). The HP Z2 Mini G1a is expected to be available on HP.com/z this spring, at which point HP will also reveal its pricing.
Mini PCs were everywhere at CES 2025, but we think businesses should take particular note of the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 2M. This uses Intel’s excellent Core Ultra 200V series of chips, complete with a powerful NPU, with support for up to 32GB of memory and an M.2 SSD that supports Gen 5 x4 drives.
It also includes a pair of 2.5GbE connectors and two Thunderbolt 4 slots, one of which supports power delivery up to 100W. That makes this ideal for mounting behind a monitor, particularly as MSI provides a “power button on a cable” so you don’t need to reach around to switch it on.
We expect the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 2M to go on sale early in 2025, but don’t yet have prices.
We almost walked by this laptop. Just another monster device packed with the latest and most powerful components, we thought, this time a Core Ultra 9 275HX and GeForce RTX 5090 laptop graphics. But here’s the thing: if you’re a creator who needs a killer yet mobile machine, the MSI Stealth 18 HX AI A2XW is hard to beat.
First off, it has an 18in 4K screen that uses mini-LED technology, covers 100% of the DCI-P3 gamut, has a 120Hz refresh rate and is VESA DisplayHDR 1000 certified. So videos, photos and artwork will look amazing. And, let’s face it, so will games.
Second, its magnesium-aluminium alloy includes a vapour chamber to keep those components running at high load for extended periods. And if you prefer AMD to Intel, that’s no problem – the new Stealth will come with the latest Ryzen AI Max chips too.
We await pricing or indeed a release date, but can tell you it weighs 2.9kg and includes a 99.9Wh battery.
AMD released six new families of processors at CES 2025, but the one that caught our eye is the AMD Ryzen AI Max. And in truth the one we really, really want is the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, with its 16 cores, 32 threads, 80MB of cache and beefy Radeon 8060S graphics.
Why will it make a difference to professionals? For a start, rendering times. Thanks in part to its support for unified memory, so it can be shared across the CPU and GPU, it’s a cracking choice for rendering – AMD reckons it’s 2.6x faster than the Core Ultra 9 288V. It boasts a 86% uplift in Vray versus an MacBook Pro with a 12-core M4 inside too.
We expect laptops with Ryzen AI Max chips to start shipping before the end of Q1 2025. AT which point we’ll be able to put AMD’s claims to the test.
We’re fans of TCL’s Nxtpaper technology, with the Nxtpaper 50 Pro winning one of our Best of IFA 2024 awards. With the Nxtpaper 11 Plus, it goes 1.0 better, moving from Nxtpaper 3.0 technology to Nxtpaper 4.0. The promise is richer colours and sharper text, and our early look at the 11.5in tablet suggested this was indeed true.
You also benefit from 100% coverage of the sRGB gamut, 120Hz refresh rates and a peak brightness of 550cd/m2 – the reduced glare of the matte screen will also help in bright conditions. It looks sharp, too.
TCL has also made it easier to switch between a mono comfort mode (great for reading books) and a distraction-free mode, which you can switch between at the press of a button. It reckons AI will help you find the best comfort mode for you, too.
With a super-compact chassis, and hopefully a great price (this is to be confirmed), we look forward to testing the Nxtpaper 11 Plus Android tablet for ourselves in the coming couple of months.
