I'm not alone in thinking and saying that the annual Consumer Electronics Show is always hot air and lately not a lot of that. (See We're Done with CES – in both senses.)

But Time magazine's Harry McCracken says no, it definitely probably isn't true because there is this other CES he calls the secret one. It's the CES behind the CES where companies and people go to show off their brilliant technologies while everyone else is looking at their not so brilliant technologies:

Every CES participant attends his or her own distinct Shadow CES: Nobody gets to see anywhere near all of it, and I’m afraid that some of the juiciest parts are off-limits to journalists like me. (They involve hush-hush products we won’t learn about for months to come — in some cases, not until CES 2015 or beyond.) So it doesn’t make sense to declare that this year’s Shadow CES was better or worse than last year’s Shadow CES. But I do know that it remains an essential ritual — and that any assessment of CES’s relevance that doesn’t acknowledge its importance is too incomplete to take seriously.

We could wait for two years to see if he's right – or we could just look back two years. CES 2012 featured laptops and TV sets. Okay. There was a thing that let you control Windows with your eyes. Haven't seen a lot of that around though, to be fair, each time I use a Windows I tend to roll my eyes and that's the kind of edge case that delays a product launch.

Verizon had a Borg-like eyepiece for you to see your mobile phone without lifting it up. HP unveiled a laptop that was apparently just as good as a MacBook Air so that was definitely innovation, so there, QED.

And Audi showed a car that did something. This year's CES featured a lot of cars doing a lot of things with your smartphone but we are still waiting for KITT.

I am a fan of technology that can help me and I love how it has enabled me to do more and to be in a career I wouldn't have imagined. I have no doubt that there is more and better to come. But lauding this year's tinsel and saying yeah, but, but, next year, just you wait, that is too asinine to take seriously.