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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.
I should have elaborated a bit more on my Nvidia bullet points. I know that we weren't expecting new consumer GPUs, but I wasn't expecting Jenson to spend most of his 90 minutes talking about Rubin, their new datacenter platform at the CONSUMER electronics show.
Also should have broken DLSS and Frame-Gen into separate bullet points. I agree the DLSS updates look nice, the "more AI" comment was directed at Frame-Gen. I am of the the opinion that game devs should spend the time to optimize their games to actually run on current hardware instead of relying on generating "fake" frames. Not to mention the increased latency only makes Frame-Gen tech "worth it" when the game is running at a decent frame rate already, which doesn't help people with lower end or older cards.
I don't know if this is useful or not, but reps from the company I work for came away from meetings with Nvidia and AMD with plans for two separate price increases this year, one at the end of this month and another toward mid-year.
I'm not privy to the reasoning behind these plans, but if I had to guess, I'd wager this month's increase is a correction for the insane prices on memory right now, but the mid-year bump may be based on expectations that manufacturers will raise unit costs. Make of that what you will.
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
That one at least looks reusable if you stick new lollipops on it. I imagine it ran off AA/AAA batteries. Though Idk why a cheap AM/FM walkman and some headphones wouldn't have been a better option all around, even for a kid. I had some dollar store pocket radio/tape player as a kid. But theoretically, the product from that video could still be blasting FM music straight to your dome today! Though I'm also imagining how sticky it might be by now. Ugh, gross...
There are no new ideas in the world... but sometimes there's a profit motive to rehash old ideas in a more damaging way? sigh :/
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.
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.
OLEDs are a pretty massive improvement in many ways, and they're increasingly normal. Prices have continued dropping (ignoring tariffs in the US).
OLEDs are also hardly new. We bought our big Sony Bravia model probably 3-4 years ago and it wasn’t even state of the art at the time. It was about the time that quantum dots started to hit the market. Even before QD-OLED came on the scene the next big thing was supposed to be inorganic micro-LED displays, a technology that is still “any day now”.
Yes, OLED is becoming cheaper and that is great, but it’s not the attention-grabbing type of thing that makes waves at CES.
I was mostly responding to this point:
I agree that the incremental updates are boring and hardly make waves, but it takes time for some cool CES tech to make its way into consumer budgets and hands. OLEDs are pretty normal now, and they're an awesome improvement in many ways.
I always wanted a 27" 4k 240Hz monitor, and that only became available and driveable with DisplayPort 2.1 DP80 cables and graphics cards within the past couple years! It's plenty shiny for me.
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.
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.
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.
The Worst Devices of CES 2026 from iFixit.
I got recommended this today. I had no idea iFixit even made videos. I really liked it, they got a bunch of experts in different fields from privacy to security to right-to-repair and then had them select their pick for the worst in their respective fields, and then explain exactly why. They cover devices I don't see covered by any other outlet because they're so bad. Like the AI Treadmill that straight up says they cannot guarantee the security of your personal biometric data they collect in their ToS!
I appreciate great consumer report pieces. This feels like some classic evening news segment stuff.
I'd read some articles linked here, including the one by iFixit about the worst in show. They made references to how bad the Samsung fridge was, but none of the articles mentioned it didn't even have HANDLES!! That is the dumbest thing to remove. Even with the voice-activated gimmick, handles are the simplest failsafe they can add because they're a basic design feature. If they want to go minimalist, they could even make like... Grooves or something. Carve a handhold in the door.
Also, am I interpreting the video right in that you need to tell it to close the door? I searched it up and DuckDuckGo's auto-AI assistant said you can also tap it. Didn't find an article explicitly addressing that, but I found this video showing how unreliable the voice command feature is. Took multiple tries to get it to open because of all the noise and hubbub at the show. Homes might not be that loud, but they can still get pretty noisy, and I can just imagine the frustration of needing to speak multiple times to open it.
Just... Wow. It absolutely deserves derision just for removing handles.
I was expecting an updated version of Samsung's 57'' monitor to be announced, but it seems like it won't be this year still. Some other companies have been releasing their own versions of it (using the same panel, I think), but while they improve on some aspects like connectivity, they sacrifice other aspects. So it is a bit difficult to pick one 57'' monitor from the few available on the market.
I'm curious, what does your setup look like to support a 57" monitor?
What do you mean? A 57'' is like having two 32'' side by side, but with the benefit of not having a separation in the middle.
This youtuber has been promoting this setup for two https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A7pFsOTV3s