Disruptions: At CES, a Big Stage for Big Dreams but Fewer Surprises LAS VEGAS - Marissa Mayer and 50 Cent. Budgee the robot and Parrot the drone. Smartwatches and curving TVs, all sprinkled with Hollywood stardust. And a party-crashing chief executive in hot pink and leather. So it went here last week at the International CES, the hyperkinetic - and hyper-hyped - Woodstock of technology. Each year, executives, media people and dreamers of big dreams flock to CES, a.k.a. the Consumer Electronics Show, to network, show off a little and generally marvel at the latest developments in the industry. CES bills itself as the big stage for the next big things, and the official statistics are impressive: 1.8 million square feet, 3,200 exhibitors, 152,000 attendees. Inside the cavernous Las Vegas Convention Center, hipster D.J."s detonated sounds on digital turntables. Women hired to represent brands in the booths twisted and shouted. People wearing blinking sensors whizzed by on Segways. Overhead, the drones hovered. You were expecting restraint? This is Las Vegas. But in some ways, this year's show was a far cry from the shows of old. CES has been around since 1967 (it was held in Manhattan until the late 1970s), and over the years it has been the place to spot some real innovations. In 1970, the videocassette recorder was introduced at CES. In 1981, the compact disc player had its debut there. High-definition TV was unveiled in 1998, the Microsoft Xbox in 2001. This year's crop of products seemed a bit underwhelming by comparison. Down on the floor, I bumped into Brian Lam, a friend who has been going to CES for over a decade. As he sees it, technologies like smartphones have matured to the point that they now satisfy many peoples" needs and expectations. But that isn't going to stop companies from trying to sell us bright new things. "You only need a phone and a tablet and a laptop, and maybe you need a TV and some headphones, but that covers 90 percent of the needs for 90 percent of the population," said Mr. Lam, the editor of The Wirecutter, a gadget website. "But this industry that employs all of these engineers, and has all of these factories and sales people, needs you to throw out your old stuff and buy new stuff - even if that new stuff" is only slightly upgraded. Also among the booths was Natasha Dow Schüll, an associate professor in the science, technology and society program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was equally skeptical about finding real innovation here this year. A lot of CES is complete nonsense. It's like a high tech SkyMall," Ms. Schüll said. There is this overuse of the word - innovation, innovation, innovation. More often than not, she said, what people are showing is just a new twist on existing technology. The organizers of CES view things differently, of course. Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association, used just about every opportunity to talk up the innovation to be found here. But even in one of this year's hot new categories - smartwatches - many of the products being shown seemed big and slow. Everybody was talking about wearable technology - and certainly some were wearing Google Glass - but let's face it: Many of these products are never going to take off. "Nine out of 10 of these wearables are going to fail," J. P. Gownder, a technology analyst for Forrester Research, told me last week. And all those TVs, another big attention-grabber this year? Geoffrey Morrison, a writer for CNET, said that, in general, most people did not get a better viewing experience with curved televisions. "In order to get the "more immersive" benefits, you have to be sitting at a very exact point, not only in terms of distance but in height as well," he wrote in an email. We may look back at CES 2014 and find that some of the products there eventually changed the world. And the show is nothing if not entertaining - and exhausting. It is still the place where technology executives from Yahoo's Ms. Mayer down come to mingle and maybe cut a deal or two. A lot of the action happens off the CES floor, in lush hotel suites on the Strip. Yes, Google, Sony and Cisco all had booths. But they also rented suites to show off new technologies and to network in style. Twitter, Facebook, Pandora and others didn't even bother with booths. In a suite in the Palazzo hotel, Greg Duffy, chief executive and co-founder of Dropcam, a wireless webcam, explained why: "It's very noisy on the show floor, and you need a quiet place to meet." One night last week, the chief executive of T-Mobile, John Legere, wearing a leather jacket over his pink T-Mobile T-shirt, crashed a party being held by his archrival, AT&T. He apparently wanted to see Macklemore, who was performing. After a CNET reporter posted on Twitter that Mr. Legere was there, the executive was escorted out. Email: bilton@nytimes.com