In excess we trust: Let us now praise over-the-top tech

It’s late Sunday as I write this, and I seem to have made it home to my rent-controlled sanctuary somewhere in Manhattan — or beneath it, you’ll never know. I started detoxing Friday evening because a permanently drunken perspective is useful only in Las Vegas. Walk around that way in New York for more than six hours and they’ll find you floating face-down in a Brooklyn dumpster the following morning.

When I came out of my J. Walker-caffeine coma around 2 a.m. on Sunday morning, I hurriedly gathered all the free thumb drives I’d collected and used to store my show notes, plunking them into the decorative fruit bowl on the dining room table of my high-roller’s suite. Torturing my brain, I managed to get them into what I believed was chronological order affixing sequential number stickers to each with a stolen glue stick and tears. Then I stuffed them into my pockets and suitcases along with what I’m pretty sure weren’t my clothes and sprinted to the airport and a 7 a.m. flight back to the City That Lies About Never Sleeping.

[ Tech and loathing in Las Vegas: For four-eyes only: The Google Glass future is here | Sense Mother, may I? The most disturbing tech of CES | Can we talk? Send your tech war story to offtherecord@infoworld.com and get a $50 AmEx gift cheque if InfoWorld publishes it. We’re all ears! ]

My cab driver on the way to McCarran had been a passenger on my way there, now working off severe gambling debts he incurred impressing his exotic new dancer-wife, Shadow, while my cab driver from LaGuardia was Travis Kalanick courageously crossing growing taxi driver picket lines trying to drum up business for Uber. Different men, but both were mumbling angry Babylonian curses to themselves, and both were driving Toyota Priuses — which are surprisingly roomy and slow.

Once I made it home and Pammy had lovingly refused to give me a travel-stress-reducing neck rub, I dug my thumb drives out of my various bags, clothes, and crevices; poured a cup of New York cwu-a-offee; and got to work contemplating the last stage of the Cringely CES formula: the Hidden Hotness. This exalted echelon of electronic eminence is voraciously coveted by all CES technorati and very difficult to achieve. Unlike a mere “best of show” designation, the Hidden Hotness has actual requirements. It needs to combine the pinnacle of CES’s two most important business disciplines: gratuitous engineering and bald-faced marketing hype.

T-Mobile’s smoke and mirrors

I had several contenders to choose from, beginning with T-Mobile and the new buyback program it’s flinging at customers in a last, lifesaver-in-the-waves attempt to keep from drowning. However, seeing as how this is really just a way for CEO John Legere to funnel money from his engineering budget that otherwise might foolishly be squandered improving the carrier’s service and instead pour it into a marketing campaign that might keep the company from dying out like a big pink panda in an ill-managed zoo, it only qualified as a leader in marketing.

I’m a trained journalist with a keen eye, so I don’t miss details like that, even though Legere attempted to blind me with his hipster haircut and fantastic keynote quotes he made during his speech the day after he got kicked out of Monday’s AT&T event. “It’s not Joe Shmoe pulling porn off the Internet that’s the problem,” he growled, “it’s the data cap.” That’s just one of many. See if you can find it on the YouTubes.

I’ve met Joe Shmoe and he says he’s going to stop downloading the dirt because why would you want to look at smut on your tiny phone screen anyway? Shmoe was killed a few days later when he walked in front of bus while staring at his phone with a badly timed Viagra episode. They’re making a preventative infomercial about it starring Andy Dick.

Size matters

The other contender is actively trying to invalidate Shmoe’s tiny-screen objection to mobile erotica. Huawei’s honking Ascend Mate 2 LTE phablet is an engineering megamarvel that tiptoed into being at the Las Vegas Convention Center with the understated elegance of a Kardashian at low tide. Imagine a communications device roughly the size of your head that won’t fit in any pocket outside a Samsonite and delivers groundbreaking engineering in the form of a larger battery, as well as the ability to share that juice with your other electronic devices via a USB charging port, thus combating the growing possibility of USB extinction we’re witnessing in the wild.

Again, despite inherent engineering wizardry, the Ascend Mate 2 shone in only one of my two desired disciplines. Its marketing campaign came in a distant 1,715th at CES behind the dancing taxidermist squirrels (a real thing). I needed something that exalted them both.

Then I realized it had been staring me in the face all along. The Hidden Hotness had been hiding in highly pixelated plain sight: 4K TVs.

Fork it over for 4K

“Oh, by Zuckerberg’s impacted testicles, Cringely,” you might sigh in an exasperated tone. Maybe that would just be me. In any case, I understand that on the surface, 4K television might seem an overly obvious swing-and-a-miss for the dual-disciplined, exalted excellence that is the Hidden Hotness moniker. After all, at their estimated initial price of $100,000.99 (or three bitcoins), only Lindsay Lohan’s lawyers could afford one.

Also, no one knows when they’ll be showing up in real life, so we don’t know when to move our children into the furnace room to make space for it. Outside of Netflix, no one is committing to creating 4K content; even if you enrolled your kids in Apex Tech rather than Yale and purchased one, then managed to heave the Brobdingnagian thing into your house, there wouldn’t be anything to watch. Finally, you just got used to seeing Terry Bradshaw’s crusted nasal hair in HDTV — what’s to care about yet another high-def standard?

They’re all cogent arguments, and they’re all beside the point. We gurgled these objections into our collective drinks 15-plus years ago when we were all scoffing at HDTV, which was then still soaked and crawling from its R&D birth canal. The similarities are exact: massive price, foggy release schedules, ridiculous size rumors, and a who-needs-it market attitude. A decade and a half later, your children burst into tears when you show them the CRT TV you had in college while playing your wedding video off VHS.

HDTV was vilified by most of us back then … right up until the day we actually saw one. The droplets of spittle flying out of Bill Cowher’s mouth as he threatened a ref’s infant son, the new wrinkle on Katie Couric’s forehead that makeup couldn’t cover, the gaping vacuum behind the eyes where a soul would be on every reality-show contestant — we didn’t know these wondrous nuances of entertainment existed before we caught a glimpse of them in glorious 1080p, when they instantly became an integral and ubiquitous part of our active couch lives.

The same will happen for 4K. I wish all of you could have been at CES, wandering through the 4K exhibits, high on drink and the massive, cornea-captivating visuals, and ecstatic that they’d soon be gracing the groaning walls where your kids’ bunk beds used to be. They’re the pinnacle of gratuitous engineering, no doubt. And the fact that most of us were so giddy with a glance at 4K that we were unable to even conceive of the four little arguments I just made until we got home and reluctantly regrounded our lives in the cold gray cement of HD LCD, that’s a testament to spectacular marketing. It sweeps aside reason and instills only the ravenous need for unmanageable credit card debt.

In short, 4K is the bifecta that truly exemplifies the Hidden Hotness. I, for one, will be the poorer for having seen it, probably next Christmas at Best Buy.