The enormous, over-the-top, excess-filled Consumer Electronics Show—CES to us in the biz—has come to an end. We've wrapped up a week of running around Vegas like crazy people, forsaking sleep and eating in taxis or while hunched over vendor-provided buffet tables in product demo rooms.

Although we had a total of eight intrepid reporters in Vegas, we each had our own coverage goals, which meant that we rarely saw each other. In fact, at no point was the entire Ars team assembled in one place—the closest we came to all seeing each other was our team dinner at the LVH's Benihana restaurant.

With so many of us covering so many different things, it was inevitable that we'd all end up with different opinions and takeaways from the show. Here's what each of the Ars CES crew got from our week in the neon-lit dusty desert.

Cars and stormtroopers

It seems like companies in the auto industry turned CES into their own tech show this year, putting a whole new spin on "mobile device apps" with their developer programs and their embrace of Web standards and open source. A hall that used to be dominated by car stereo manufacturers was commandeered by nine carmakers and a host of automotive software companies, and there was a whole extra pavilion of automotive electronics manufacturers. GM chose CES to introduce its 4G-based OnStar services, and Ford announced that more of its Sync-equipped cars already on the road would be upgraded to support AppLink—making it possible for their owners to do everything from finding a parking place to ordering a Domino's Pizza by voice command.

But don't get too excited—MyFord Touch isn't yet getting AppLink support. Escape owners will have to wait to get their pizzas—or they can just call Domino's on their phones like some kind of primitive animal.

The most bizarre moment at CES had to be 50 Cent making an appearance at the booth of SMS Audio, the headphone company he owns. He showed up flanked by two Imperial stormtroopers and announced his cross-licensing agreement with Disney’s Lucasfilm to make Star Wars headphones. We're unsure if the artist realized the irony in using the Empire's shock troops as representatives of the enormously powerful corporation to which he was allying himself, but if 50 Cent had announced a deal with the actual Empire, the scene likely would have looked exactly the same.

—Sean Gallagher

Bright lights, dim trends

It's not unreasonable to feel cynical about CES. As a predictor of future trends, it has a notoriously poor track record. The biggest companies have scaled back their presence or pulled out entirely, opting to create their own media events where they don't have to compete with other show-induced noise. Even the ideas that may have legs—the seemingly inevitable rise of the 4K TV and the encroaching mess of wearable tech—probably won't be adopted widely in the forms seen at the show.

And yet CES still has value. Individual gadgets can stick out from the rest—every time I get to use the Oculus Rift, I want it a little more. I love seeing more software diversity in PCs, and projects like Chrome OS and SteamOS exemplify that. Every now and then, a company steps away from bizarre headline-grabbing experimentation and just makes a damn good product. And finally, the side of it that you the reader don't really get to see firsthand: the chance to put names to faces and do some networking, which tangibly and indisputably improves the stories we'll be doing for the rest of the year.

CES is big, tiring, and garish. Let's do it again next year.

—Andrew Cunningham