The Vergecast Live at CES 2026: What is the point of a robot that falls over?

This year’s CES was an odd one. This is a conference usually dominated by futuristic, expensive TVs and futuristic, expensive cars, but those things weren’t what dominated CES 2026. Instead, Las Vegas was filled with new ideas about old gadgets and showed us a whole lot of really impressive hardware waiting on software to catch up.

On this episode of The Vergecast, recorded live at the Brooklyn Bowl in Vegas, David and Nilay talk through some of the big stories from this year’s show. (Thanks to everyone who came to see us and stuck around after for drinks and bowling — we had a blast hanging with all of you!) We talk about the robots that can’t seem to stand up, why it seems like every company is suddenly making everything, the return of the Weird Ideas About PCs, battery life, and much more.

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The focus at CES is always on individual products, and there are lots of interesting ones this year, from the Lego Smart Brick to the Clicks Communicator to the rows upon rows of robot vacuums we saw in the convention center. Some things will ship and be great; some won’t. (We have a game in this episode about that, too.) But every year, if you look past the gadgets themselves, you can start to get a sense of what the tech industry cares about — and how our lives might change in the year to come. It’s still early, and 2026 is shaping up to be a year, but we have some ideas already.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, and to check out the rest of our CES coverage, here are some links to get you started: