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Consumer Electronics Show 2026
With CES 2026 coming to a close, I figured that like last year, I should make a thread to see what people are excited (or not excited) for.
I honestly wasn't that excited (see recent state of US economy) but I want to your thoughts!
Previous Topics:
Dell's CES 2026 chat was the most pleasingly un-AI briefing I've had in maybe five years
I didn't post in the thread as I didn't have much to add, the top post by @Oxalis basically sums up my thoughts
Nice to see them be honest about how this isn't really panning out. Everyone wants AI except the consumer.
Clicks Communicator: the ultimate communication companion
Again didn't post in here but I'm glad there is a still a market for niche phone.
This year had me rolling my eyes a the huge amount of AI but I figured I should gather my thoughts to kick the thread off.
Highlights:
Intel honestly surprised me with PatherLake (Core Ultra Series 3). Despite Intel's track record of shooting themselves in the foot, I'm glad that they are making a starting the return of comeback. Competition is needed in the space otherwise they'll just sit on their laurels and not innovate. This is their first chips on their 18A process which has been many years in the making. I would have liked for Pat Gelsinger (who was unfairly fired at the end of 2024 IMO) to see the fruits of his effort but alas.
In last years CES 2025 topic I said that I like Dell's laptop rebrand and (rightly) got some flac for it. It seems like consumers agreed with y'all and Dell brought back the XPS line
New monitors and TVs
Lowlights
AMD mostly disappointed me this year as most of their announcements were mostly rebrands of last year's chips
The most interesting thing AMD announced was some Strix Halo SOCs with lower CPU core counts but kept the same GPU. This was to lower the cost of Strix Halo gaming focused devices which didn't need a 16 core CPU. While this is good news, and will lead to more Strix Halo devices + laptops (there were some on the show floor), it doesn't change that Strix Halo still costs premium.
Nvidia gave us no new GPUs for mere mortals (AI go brrr)
instead they gave us
Plus there was not confirmation from AMD or Nvidia about rumored GPU price hikes due to tariffs.
Overall a fairly mid year IMO but interested in hearing what y'all think!
There was no reason to expect Nvidia to have GPU launches. This isn't their cadence. It's expected the 6xxx series would be in '27. Occassionally they've had Super series launches in the off years, but it's not guarantee, and there's no reason to have expected there to be any in '26.
DLSS 4.5 looks pretty nice. I don't think there's much value in segregating it as "AI". In the end, DLSS is a bunch of matrix transformations that take place in the rasterization pipeline. That is also ALL rendering - it's all matrices. That's why GPUs are good for deep learning to begin with - they were optimized for matrix multiplication, since that's what graphics rendering comprises.
Gaming graphics is a long history of hacks to make the incredibly challenging task of "make 30/60/120/etc images in a second possible". DLSS is just another chapter. If it works well, it works well.
Related engadget articles:
The weirdest tech we've seen at CES 2026 so far
Engadget's best of CES 2026: All the new tech that caught our eye in Las Vegas
Along those same lines, I got an email from iFixit today about Repair.org's "Worst in Show."
I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I'm still kind of shocked. Much like the kids that would potentially be using these. The only saving grace is that in a country where Kinder Eggs are banned, these surely will never be allowed to see the light of day, right?
There are no new ideas in the world
I think it's worth looking at the concept gadgets to see what new technologies could emerge. The self-focusing glasses and color-changing nail tips hint at the near-maturity of some useful improvements - not needing five pairs of glasses, or multiple copies of the same object just to have different colors available. The stair-climbing robot vacuum hints at a future of increasingly sophisticated mobility assists and repair/rescue robots or telepresence devices. Mountain/crater-climbing planetary exploration rovers! [I'm still 12 years old at heart and get excited about this stuff, but I've never been to a CES and suspect that the dreary, overhyped repetition would burn that right out of me.]
Humanoid robots... much smarter people than I have peered deeply into the ethical and economic traps they pose. We haven't solved human enslavement yet. Expensive, fragile, inept simulacra of humans aren't going to be replacing soldiers, surgeons, sex workers, caregivers, etc. any time soon, even with LLMs or specific models powering them. The real power is going to be in task-specialized robotics powered by refined AI models and geospatial awareness, that can do a very narrow range of things much better than humans can. I've already seen janitor robots (which basically look like oversized Roombas) covering whole hospitals, picking up trash, vacuuming, and mopping continuously.
Otherwise, laptops and consumer electronics are following the same commodity refinement path as cars - incremental technology improvements that don't change the fundamental nature of the devices. The increasing competitiveness of Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 processors vs. AMD, Intel, and Apple is kind of cool, but again incremental even with the NPU addition. Slapdash insertion of AI "features" is just marketing fairy dust right now.
Preface: I don't really bother with tech websites, as they're just an endless wave of fluff and internal links, so finding out what's truly novel or an interesting improvement is a bit of self inflicted pain, but whatever.
I saw Hyundai has got Boston Dynamics to create an enterprise ready version of electric Atlas, with quite a simple looking design. I assume they're currently aiming for work on production lines.
It's quite strange that humanoid robotics is stepping out of sci-fi, and making an entrance into the modern world, along with all the issues it'll bring.
The Nvidia strobing backlight seems to be harking back to CRT rolling displays, using a coarse array of rows, to eliminate image persistence/smearing.
Apparently the minimum FPS that it works at currently is 75hz, which is fine for a lot of modern gaming. But I wonder if this tech could be improved, without causing headaches for sensitive people or pets, so that TV and films could benefit from it as well.
The visual clarity would be worth it.
The click communicator does look like a breath of fresh air in phone design, with many hardware features that others have sadly decided to forget. It'll be interesting to see if people find it enjoyable to use as a primary device, and if apps display on it without feeling cramped. Hopefully it sells well, and the support for it is respectable.
I haven't caught up on the TV side. MicroLED news is welcome, it's been a good few years of manufacturing improvements to get this far. Having a normal display sized panel would be excellent.
I saw a video of an electroluminescent QD display at previous CES, which was very interesting, but would still suffer from high energy decay in the blue channel.
I don't follow CES news but I have happened across a lot of social media posts about people being upset about how everything this year is basically just the same old shit but with more AI. One TikTok video I saw was someone exaggerating saying that the whole show was robot vacuums, and the one that I actually saw someone really get excited about was someone producing a glorified clone of the Novint Falcon.
Frankly, consumer tech has been kind of shit for the past decade. Cell phones and tablets have basically become what we call tech now, so companies aren't really doing too much innovation in general. The only thing I can remember from last year's CES was a TV that took batteries that if you didn't regularly replace, it would fall off the wall. And honestly, it feels like every year is just display manufacturers talking about technology that seems to be continually "coming soon" but I can't get very excited about because improving picture fidelity more and more gives vanishingly small returns.
Perhaps more importantly, if I actually wanted to follow CES reveals I'd need to look through tech reporting, which is an endless parade of "journalists" glazing these companies no matter how useless their garbage ewaste products are or how unlikely it is that it will ever come to market.
I am confused in several different ways by this statement.
Probably https://displace.tv/
Portable/fully wireless TV that can mount to the wall with suction.
It was some “truly wireless TV” that used an electric pump to create suction so it would stick against glass.
Roborock's stair climbing prototype is a nice upgrade over the step climbing prototype last year. Having one robot for all the house would be nice, though most likely it'll just be another failure point.
I was glad to see another Frame competitor, but the Alexa+ focus killed any interest I have in actually switching. None of the articles I read said anything about whether or not it has a base station (so you only need to run a single cable to the TV), the Hisense version seemed nice but without the base station it wasn't an option for me.
Beyond that I found this CES fairly disappointing. The display tech is all the same stuff they were showcasing last year, and still pretty much equally out of reach. Yet another light laptop, more releases of the same electronics for no other reason than the economic necessity of new releases. The AI nonsense doesn't help my negative feelings.
The lego smart brick is interesting, but since I don't have kids it doesn't do much for me. The promise of a Rosie remains vague and distant, but maybe a little less distant.
For me Dell stood out for saying what many could have easily predicted. Consumers don't want AI. It's made hardware prices skyrocket, has replaced a lot of workers despite the tech being pretty shit, and is getting very justified consumer backlash as a result.
Even Razer went all-in on the AI slop this year.