 Every year at the Consumer Electronics Show we see more and more laptops. We've seen crazy light and thin ones, giant gaming ones and ones that flip and spin around. So this year the laptops haven't been as insane but there's a few that give us a little glimpse about what to expect for the rest of the year. So let's start with HP Spectre X360 and Dell's XPS 15. Now these are both 15-inch laptops so what really matters is exactly what's inside, which is Intel's actual processor and then AMD's graphics. This is the first time we've seen such a thing and what it basically means is we're probably going to see gaming laptops or laptops that are capable of playing games anyway at the sort of size and form factor of these two devices. Dell's XPS 15 2-in-1 is new this year and we've obviously seen the XPS 15 before but this one has the hinge so you can go put it into tablet mode and as you can see this is a quite a regular looking laptop but the graphics support on it so playing games and stuff like that should be a little bit better. It's not going to be amazing just yet but I think that's going to set the stage for us having gaming laptops inside of laptops that look kind of normal. Now this is the first time that AMD and Intel have paired up since like the 1980s so that's also kind of interesting to see what could happen for the rest of the year there. Dell's XPS 15 also includes a maglev keyboard. Now that sounds pretty fancy and it kind of is so what's inside is essentially magnets sit underneath the keys and they hold the keys in place. Now that means that it's actually got a little bit less travel but it feels and sounds a lot clickier so it's quite interesting to see that on this particular laptop and on Windows laptops in general and the keyboard is slightly thinner so something more like the Apple MacBook Pro but it's kind of interesting you're seeing Dell doing this and that might mean we see some of the other PC makers do a similar sort of thing with their keyboards. Speaking of experimentation we're starting to see quite a lot less of that this year. There's not so many crazy flipping laptops and people are sort of settling on their own designs but what we are starting to see and we saw it in December is these new ARM powered laptops. Now basically what that means is you're starting to see laptops that are going to have all-day battery life that's 20 plus hours they're going to be able to be put on standby can throw them in your bag pick them up and they're not going to be out of battery and inside you're going to get the similar sort of components you would any other laptop and the form factors that we've seen so far are mainly tablets and two-in-ones but I think we're probably going to see a lot more experimentation later in the year we might even get some just regular clamshell laptops. So this is Lenovo's MIX 630 and as you can see it looks like a laptop stroke tablet it's kind of like a surface a two-in-one sort of thing we've seen quite a few times before. What's really unique about this particular device is inside there's a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor and what that means is there's basically phone components inside so you're going to get LTE connectivity inside this you're going to be able to use it on the train anywhere outside the house and it's basically it snaps off so you can use it as a tablet as well and you're going to get all the obviously the LTE connectivity it's going to be around about 20 hours battery life is what they're saying so that's kind of like the key thing about this it's quite a nice little device it's thin and light so you've got the single USB type-c port on the back and so kind of like the future of tablets and laptops that we're seeing and I think this sets the stage for this and other devices like the HP one as well same sort of family devices so sets the stage for what we might see in 2018 which is a lot more arm-powered Windows laptops. So another train I've started to see is HDR laptops. Now HDR is high dynamic range and basically what that means is you're going to get a little bit better detail when you're watching like a TV and a movie colors will pop the blacks will be blacker so it's really good for like viewing content and stuff like Netflix and stuff like that what we're kind of waiting to see now is for Windows to be updated Netflix all those sort of different applications so it's still really early days but I think once that comes we're probably going to see a lot more HDR laptops throughout 2018 and beyond. We didn't see many Chromebooks this year but Razer is experimenting with its own Android powered phone and docking it and turning from a phone into a laptop now we've seen this a bunch of times Motorola's Atrix, Samsung's DexDock, even Microsoft's own Continuum stuff on Windows Phone and a lot of those projects have failed in the past but Razer stuff is very much a prototype at the moment too. I don't think we're going to see a phone that turns into a laptop be a success this year but it's good to see another company giving it a go and trying another concept to see if we can get to that point. So aside from all those laptops we also saw some regular plain old laptops this year too so Dell refreshed the XPS 13 to a new white color with a kind of rose gold finish on it as well and it's one of the better Windows laptops and they've changed the design slightly but they still had the webcam placement down the bottom so it's still staring up your nose. Acer also introduced a new Swiss 7 and it's taken the title as the world's thinnest laptop. Now we've seen Acer experiment with being thin and light before and this particular device the keyboard doesn't feel quite as good but it's good to see Acer push everyone else to do thin and light laptops that's still something that obviously Acer cares about and I think that's something that we like to see. Now aside from the hardware on the software side I think we're going to see a lot of Amazon Alexa appearing on Windows PCs throughout the year. Amazon announced at CES that Alexa will be built into a bunch of different laptops from HP, Lenovo, Asus and Acer. Now those devices are coming later this year but I'm curious to see whether we'll ever see Google Assistant appear on Windows laptops. It's obviously on Google's own Pixelbook but it'd be interesting if it made the jump over to the Windows side as well. So all of those trends combined with Microsoft's work on Windows 10 and the updates and also their ability to push the ARM laptops out makes for a really interesting 2018 for laptops and it's something we haven't probably seen for quite a while.