17 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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Sean Hollister

Sean Hollister

Senior Editor

Senior Editor

    More From Sean Hollister

    Sean Hollister
    Sean Hollister
    Would you buy a Tamagotchi for your plants?

    The company calls it Senso, and it’s cute! Detachable heads and charger so you can leave the probe in soil. Light, temperature, humidity, and soil moisture, plus a whole AI pitch I’m not quite buying. I’d be more tempted if it weren’t a Kickstarter and had a local smart home API. (YouTube version here.)

    Sean Hollister
    Sean Hollister
    Here’s another Chinese drone that had to abort a US launch.

    GDU Technology’s Li Lei says she’s not sure whether it might truly hurt her company. “It’s really hard to tell because they’re changing drone policy all the time,” she tells me at CES. Also, GDU mostly sells in China. But it just recently expanded in the US, and now its just-announced flagship P300 won’t come here.

    Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
    Sean Hollister
    Sean Hollister
    This tiny spaceman helps Windows laptops and iPads play better together.

    15 years ago, j5create made a cable that magically let you drag and drop between PCs and Macs. Now, it’s got a $70 USB-C astronaut dongle that wirelessly links Windows PCs with iPads here at CES. You can send files, mirror displays, and beam your mouse and keyboard. I can’t vouch for latency yet — Wi-Fi reliability at CES is kind of crap.

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    <em>Cute, right? </em>
    <em>And small. </em>
    <em>Technically, the spaceman is mostly for show — it houses a USB-A dongle.</em>
    <em>I took this selfie on the iPad, and now I’m using the share screen to beam it via j5create’s app.</em>
    <em>Now here it is on the Windows desktop.</em>
    <em>You can mirror both directions; on Windows, your iPad mirror appears in.a window.</em>
    <em>The packaging.</em>
    1/7
    Cute, right?
    Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
    Sean Hollister
    Sean Hollister
    Ever touched a material so light you can’t even feel it?

    This is Soramatex from Sora Materials. They wouldn’t tell me what it is, save that it uses carbon powder, which makes it sound like maybe it’s graphene aerogel — which, to be clear, already exists and can get even lighter. But it’s not every day I get to touch impossibly light lab material! (YouTube version here.)

    Sean Hollister
    Sean Hollister
    I guess ‘eGPU’ wasn’t sexy enough so they’re ‘AI boxes’ now.

    External GPUs are rad but many need work — maybe they’ll take off now we’re throwing AI dollars at them? Gigabyte, Plugable, and newcomer Ugreen aren’t even calling them “eGPUs” anymore here at CES. Guess I can’t complain unless AI companies buy them all up.

    From Gigabyte’s Aorus brand.
    Plugable.
    Ugreen.
    A smaller Gigabyte Aorus one.
    1/4
    From Gigabyte’s Aorus brand.
    Sean Hollister
    Sean Hollister
    I can hold up 180fps* in Battlefield 6 with one hand.

    *To be clear, this was with Intel’s XeSS upscaling, at 1080p resolution, with 4x frame gen — the actual framerate was a quarter of that. But the beefiest integrated GPU in Intel’s new Panther Lake chips never let the true framerate dip below 40fps, even unplugged, with settings that looked and felt good enough for single-player games.

    This one’s a Lenovo laptop, the IdeaPad Pro 5i.
    This one’s a Lenovo laptop, the IdeaPad Pro 5i.
    Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
    Sean Hollister
    Sean Hollister
    There’s nothing at CES I want to try more than the Fly Wing X-Wing Fighter.

    Ace Combat in real life? This folding VTOL foam aircraft gives you a first-person view from inside a tiny toy fighter jet cockpit. A head-tracking DJI drone camera beams video to DJI goggles over DJI’s long-range O4 wireless tech; Fly Wing claims 60-minute battery life and nearly 75mph top speed. $2,000, tentatively in March, for the complete kit.

    <em>They showed us a pre-recorded video inside DJI’s N3 goggles; we didn’t actually fly.</em>
    <em>More pre-recorded video.</em>
    1/10
    Sean Hollister
    Sean Hollister
    Sandisk’s tiny shiny ‘leave-in’ USB-C flash drive sticks out more than I thought.

    That might be a good thing, though? When Andrew covered the announcement, he pointed out USB-C connectors are not designed to take a lot of the pressure the Extreme Fit drive might take bumping into things, but the extra housing (see image two) might reinforce it.

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    1/2
    Sean Hollister
    Sean Hollister
    AMD Ryzen AI Halo sure is small (much like its Nvidia competitor).

    Here it is next to the Framework Desktop and Corsair’s AI Workstation 300, each of which are plenty small on their own (4.5 liters)! Nvidia’s Spark, already on sale, might be slightly smaller? I saw one earlier but don’t have it to compare. AMD’s Halo is coming Q2 2026, no price yet.

    Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge