It's standing room only in a swirly-carpeted room at the conference centre attached to the Mandalay Bay hotel – yes, that one – in Las Vegas. "CES 2017 brought the whoa," appears on screen, followed by a sequence of fast-cut shots of robots, drones and VR headsets. So get ready for more whoa than ever before." If this year's Consumer Electronics Show is anything to go by, it's less "whoa, that's awesome" and more "whoa there, do we really need this?" The annual tech trade show seems less about real innovation breakthroughs solving unmet needs and more about incrementally improved nice-to-haves for the 1%. The technology industry does not appear to have learned from all of the soul-searching it did last year in the wake of the demise of companies like Juicero, which made a $400 internet-connected juice-maker that attracted $120m in funding. The company folded six months after Bloomberg showed that its pre-portioned fruit and veg packets could be squeezed just as effectively by hand.