The Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, is one of the biggest and buzziest tech events of the year, offering a first look at next-generation TVs, laptops, smart home gadgets, cars, and more. In 2026, the event is being held in Las Vegas from January 6–9, and The Verge will be on the ground covering it all. Follow along here for the biggest news from the show floor.
The Geely, Lynk & Co, and Zeekr cars we drove were all ready for US primetime.
Razer’s Min-Liang Tan says the backlash to AI slop is understandable, but that he sees a future where AI can “help game developers make better games.”
Rode snuck an interesting new member of its Rodecaster family onto the CES floor, and few people noticed. The Rodecaster Video Core brings all the features of the Rodecaster Video S to the company’s Rodecaster Pro or Rodecaster Duo interfaces, allowing them to do double duty for audio and video production.
CES saw only a very minor update to the Frame family, with the mainline adding 75-, 85-, and 98-inch models, and the Frame Pro now coming in a smaller 55-inch size. Oddly, only two of the seven mainline Frame models will support the One Connect Box — the 43- and 50-inch.
I worked exclusively on a pre-production Asus Zenbook A16 with a Snapdragon X2 processor throughout CES, and I came away impressed.
That’s me on The Vergecast, debating the finer points of our CES 2026 Best in Show: the Lego Smart Brick. Why is it smart, and is it an affront to the imagination? Spoiler: my wife isn’t convinced! And did David make the pew-pew sounds when he was a kid? Tune in.
Now that they’re returned from and processed CES 2026, they’ll be fielding your questions starting at 3PM ET. Stop by!
What’s more powerful than an AMD Strix Halo handheld? One with liquid cooling! OneXPlayer brought the Apex handheld and the Super X tablet to CES, both of which attach to this external liquid cooler. (They’re still technically portable once you disconnect.) Nelly has the best look and some benchmarks; I only had time to snap these photos.
GameSir’s Smart Drive was just a prototype at CES — a wired one at that — but I’ve always wanted to have room for a direct-drive racing wheel in my house. Maybe my thumbs are enough! $139 in Q3. (YouTube version here.)
Asus brought a completely cable-free liquid cooler to CES: Asus’s “Q-Connector” uses hidden pogo pins instead of fan/pump cables! No price, but Asus spokesperson JJ Guerrero says even some mid-range Strix motherboards should include, and you can swap the pogo pins for a cable if you change motherboards. Another way it’s becoming easier to build a beautiful PC.
Better prices, better features, and Matter support made this a standout year for the connected home.
True story: when we forgot to pack a hairdryer on a beach trip last year, I bought Wolfbox’s awesome MF100 mini blower instead. (It’s one of the top-rated ones in comparison tests.)
Now, Wolfbox has super-sized it. Wolfbox Megaflow 500 Pro; $200 in May.
It’s not just a tongue-twister — the Pocket Taco is GameSir’s tiny Game Boy styled controller for your phone, not to be confused with 8BitDo’s tiny Game Boy styled controller for your phone. This one’s Bluetooth rather than USB-C, and cradles your phone’s bottom instead of hanging off the USB-C port. It also has a $35 price and a March release date.
It’s just one of two Game Boy-styled mini-controllers that cradle your phone at CES 2026. This one plugs directly into your phone with USB-C, is coming summer 2026, but doesn’t have a price yet. GameSir has a Bluetooth one for $35 that’s coming March and cradles your phone. (YouTube video version here.)
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.)
Before saying goodbye to CES 2026, I roamed around without a destination in mind to soak up the scene with my camera. After a week of operating at breakneck pace for long hours, it felt meditative to just capture a tiny glimpse of tech on display — including some human (and very non-human) moments.
Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge
There were a couple Steam Machine mockups at Jsaux’s CES booth, but they were just shells showing off the company’s cheesy looking stickers. The front display concept wasn’t there.
Jsaux seems thirsty to build a Steam Machine accessory ecosystem like it did with the Steam Deck, where it found success, but the real ideas will require actual hardware.
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.
Smart lights that know where they’re placed in a room, wild designs for next-gen routers, and a glowing inedible donut.
Rollable laptops, twice-folding phones, and a ‘longevity station.’ This is the CES tech we come back for.
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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When I wasn’t looking at huge phones at CES I managed to track down a small one: the ikko MindOne Pro. It offers a 4-inch OLED panel and a 50-megapixel camera that flips up for selfies. The MindOne Pro will ship with Android 15 as well as a proprietary OS with AI apps that you can also use as a kind of focus mode. It’s in late stages of Kickstarter funding with shipping promised for February.
The Brolan ClearX uses “sensors” (no one could tell me what sort, though) and AI to detect what material your shoes are made from and select the appropriate cleaning and drying cycle, with “micro-nano bubble technology” to help clean. Is it too late to add this to my dubious AI roundup?
