Top Consumer Electronics Stories of 2024

2024 was a year of paradoxes in consumer electronics. While artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and cutting-edge display technology changed how people use their devices, the year also saw a surge in demand for simple, tactile controls and designs.

This collection of stories highlights the year’s most significant trends, including Meta’s audacious leap forward in augmented reality with its US $10,000 Orion glasses, Qualcomm’s success in bringing chips that use the Arm instruction set to PCs, and much more.

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While 2024 saw big advancements in artificial intelligence, touchscreens, and augmented reality, it also saw an undeniable backlash against everything digital. Touchscreens are basic. Dials are cool.

Gwendolyn Rak’s interview with Rachel Plotnick, author of the 2018 book Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing, perfectly captured the zeitgeist. Rak interviewed Plotnick about the resurgence of physical buttons and tactile controls in consumer technology, from Apple’s new iPhone buttons to the return of knobs on home appliances and car dashboards.

“There’s often this narrative of progress, that things are only getting better with technology over time,” said Plotnick. “But if we look at these lessons, I think we can see that sometimes things were simpler or better in a past moment, and sometimes they were harder.”

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Of course, truly eliminating touchscreens and digital displays isn’t going to happen. They’re just too useful. But LG and Samsung have a few ideas on how to make them less intrusive.

Alfred Poor’s article put a magnifying glass on the latest transparent OLED panels LG and Samsung demonstrated at CES 2024. I saw this technology myself, so I can back up Poor’s enthusiasm. The latest prototypes look and feel like a TV that could make itself at home in any living room.

It’s still tough technology, however, and several difficult challenges remain to be solved. Display manufacturers must position millions of microscopic LED chips with near-perfect accuracy and solve complex color uniformity issues that require thousands of calibration cycles.

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Transparent OLED is alluring, but it’s not the only advancement making its way from prototype to reality. The latest flexible OLED displays are remarkably malleable.

Some smartphones already have flexible OLED displays, but new technologies are opening the possibility of new form factors, like multi-fold and rollable devices. Mobile World Congress 2024 saw the first prototypes of rollable phones like the Motorola Adaptive Display Compact, designed to wrap around your wrist, and the Tecno Phantom Ultimate, which mechanically extends its display from 6.55 to 7.11 inches.

Separately, Katherine Bourzac also detailed new research out of South Korea’s Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) on OLED displays that maintained their function and resolution when stretched. The technology could allow novel applications in health monitoring devices and wearable computers that move with the person wearing them.

Meta

Apple released the cutting-edge Vision Pro headset in February of 2024, but Meta arguably stole Apple’s thunder with its September demonstration of Orion, a device the company billed as its “first true augmented reality glasses.” Orion is far slimmer and lighter than the Apple Vision Pro.

It’s also a prototype and reportedly costs $10,000 a pair. Rina Diane Caballar digs into why: the astronomical price tag primarily stems from the glasses’ advanced silicon carbide (SiC) lenses. While the lenses provide superior light refraction and reduced visual distortion, low production yields make them extremely expensive, a problem Meta will need to solve if it wants to take Orion to the masses.

Meta’s Orion wasn’t the only trending augmented reality story this year. IEEE Spectrum also reported on cutting-edge AR research that combines holograms with AI, the latest in ultra-high-resolution headsets, and a “lollipop” that finally makes AR lickable.

Peter DaSilva/The New York Times/Redux

IEEE Spectrum senior editor Tekla S. Perry, who joined the magazine in 1979, took a well-deserved retirement this year—but not before writing the definite story on Fitbit’s ascendent to wearable dominance.

Perry revealed how the two entrepreneurs, who had previously collaborated on a photo-sharing startup called HeyPix, transformed their “aha moment” with the Wii Nunchuk into a company that would go on to sell more than 136 million fitness trackers. Their journey began with a crude prototype made of balsam wood and culminated in a $2.1 billion acquisition by Google in 2021.

Matthew S. Smith

The delay of Microsoft’s ironically named Windows Recall, an AI search feature that was supposed to be Windows’ headline AI feature (it is now available to Windows Insiders), put a damper on the launch of Copilot Plus PCs, new laptops meant to enable Windows’ latest AI features. But that wasn’t enough to quash enthusiasm over Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X laptop chip found inside them.

The Snapdragon X Elite, unlike x86 competitors from Intel and AMD, uses the Arm instruction set. Though a popular choice for chips for numerous electronics, from smartphones to smart appliances, Arm previously struggled to find a place on the PC. Industry analysts told IEEE Spectrum that could change as Qualcomm releases more chips and new competitors, like MediaTek and Nvidia, enter the market.

xMEMS

xMEMS is best known for building innovative micro-mechanical audio devices like microphones and microspeakers. But in 2024, the company tried something different. It built a fan.

The XMC-2400 is built with piezoelectrical materials to create tiny doors that can be opened to allow air in or closed to block it. Combined with a valve on the opposite side, the movement of the doors will create pressure and move air.

At less than a centimeter wide and under a millimeter thick, the XMC-2400 can be integrated directly onto, or placed alongside, a smartphone’s system-on-chip to address the thermal challenges posed by tasks like on-device AI processing and 3D graphics. Because of its all-silicon design, the fan is built in a chip fab just like the chips it’s meant to cool.

Donghua University/National University of Singapore

Modern laptops, smartphones, and wearables have good battery life but remain bound by a simple physical reality: eventually, they need to be plugged in. But two research stories from 2024 suggest ways to get around that problem.

Katherine Bourzac reported on new electronic textiles invented by a research team at Donghua University in Shanghai. These textiles use fibers that scavenge electromagnetic energy from the environment. It’s not a lot, but enough to power a sensor or small, simple display. Critically, the textiles operate independently without a connection to an external circuit board or battery.

A separate team at Nanjing University’s School of Physics took a different tactic. They used perovskite materials like those used in solar cells to create a perovskite-LED (PeLED) display. It can both display an image and convert ambient light to energy to charge an attached battery.