The worst gadgets of CES 2017, this week on The CultCast

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Bluetooth hair brushes, smart refrigerators, dancing robots—welcome to CES 2017.
Bluetooth hair brushes, smart refrigerators, dancing robots—welcome to CES 2017.
Photo: Engadget

CES2017 This week on The CultCast: We run you through the most ridiculous gizmos at CES 2017 — stuff that nobody on earth actually needs. Then we spice things up with our most hotly anticipated tech of 2017.

And finally, we’re gonna be real with you guys…. Apple had a rough 2016. But that’s all behind us now. It’s a new year. It’s a fresh start. We discuss what Apple needs to get right in 2017.

Episode

CultCast #265 – Worst gadgets of CES 2017! Subscribe on iTunes

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This week’s topics

This week’s intro

Flow is a wearable that helps you avoid nasty air pollution

  • It can measure dust, exhaust fumes and other harmful gases, as well as the household chemicals you might encounter indoors.

Smart hairbrush tells your iPhone if you’re not brushing properly

  • Every year at CES, there’s one gadget that epitomizes the crazier side of Silicon Valley’s “connected tech” smart devices mania.
  • To do this, the smart hairbrush relies on motion sensors for monitoring your brushing patterns, conductivity sensors for spotting whether your hair is wet or dry, and a microphone for identifying “manageability, frizziness, dryness, split ends and breakage.” The brush also vibrates if you use it too vigorously.
  • All this data gets sent to your iPhone, where an app gives you a hair quality score, tells you which parts of your brushing need work, and offers hairstyling products to buy.

OWC’s gigantic dock adds more ports to the new MacBook Pro

  • OWC teased a new accessory called the DEC dock for MacBook Pro at CES
  • It’s a slab that sticks to the bottom of the laptop to add up to 4TB of additional flash or SSD storage, an SD card slot, full-size USB 3.0 ports and an Ethernet jack for wired internet.
  • The downside is that it makes your new laptop as chunky as the 2012 model. From a depth of around 0.6 inches, you’ll now have a machine that’s almost an inch thick. OWC chief Larry O’Connor said they’ve been developing the concept for over three years and feel like the time is right to release it.
  • The company doesn’t have a release date and pricing info for the DEC yet.

Griffin connects your toast to your phone

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