How-To Geek's Best of CES 2024 Award Winners

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A brand new year means brand new tech being showcased at CES 2024. We were on the ground in Las Vegas, scouring the show floors for cool gadgets and impressive innovations. We've highlighted some of our favorite products from the event, giving you a taste of what to look forward to this year.

Best Laptop: Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 12

Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Carbon series combines the best of Lenovo’s laptop design with the build quality and hardware features of the legacy ThinkPad laptops, and the X1 Carbon Gen 12 takes that even further. It’s equipped with the latest Intel Core Ultra processors, up to 64GB RAM, up to 2TB NVMe SSD storage, a fingerprint reader, and a camera privacy shutter. The spacious 14-inch screen can be configured with up to a 120Hz 2.8K OLED touch panel.

The X1 Carbon Gen 12 has a slightly changed design, with accessibility improvements in the keyboard layout, a larger 120mm trackpad (with a haptic feedback option, like Apple’s recent MacBooks). There’s still the same TrackPoint “nub” in the center of the keyboard, and you can even set custom actions for when it’s double-tapped. The laptop has great connectivity options as well, including two Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports, two USB Type-A 5Gbps ports, HDMI 2.1, an audio jack, Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.3, and optional LTE or 5G.

The new Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 12 looks like a fantastic Windows laptop, but it’s also priced to match: it starts at $2,989. Some configurations already went on sale in December, but the rest of the configuration options will be available starting in March 2024.

Best Router: TP-Link Deco BE65 Pro Mesh Router

While wireless devices that support the Wi-Fi 7 standard aren't common just yet, you can prepare for them with the TP-Link Deco BE65 Pro Mesh Router. A mesh Wi-Fi system is ideal when you need to cover a lot of ground with your wireless network and can't rely on the weak performance of Wi-Fi extenders. The BE65 Pro system supports a multi-gig network with a