What we learned from CES 2026

I picked Aqara’s Smart Lock U400 and Roborock’s Saros Rover robot vacuum as the overall best smart home gadgets from CES 2026, but there were gazillions of other great gadgets on the show floor.

It was a banner year for smart home products, and the big trends I saw weren’t about new product categories; they were about bringing better features and lower prices to smart home staples such as smart lighting, smart locks, cameras, and TVs.

At CES this year, humanoid robots appeared to be closer than ever to moving into our homes. LG introduced CLOiD, a household robot it says can handle chores like preparing food and loading the washing machine. SwitchBot showed off the Onero H1, another home helper built to tackle everyday tasks, and Boston Dynamics, WIRobotics, Zeroth, and others debuted even more impressive humanoids.

Advances in robotics and AI have made robots smarter and more capable than ever. The question is whether they’re capable enough to do our chores. We already have robots that vacuum our floors and mow our lawns — but there’s one job they haven’t mastered: laundry.

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At CES 2026 this week, people kept asking me what health tech I was seeing on the show floor. My only answer was this: bodily fluids. As in urine, blood, sweat, and saliva.

Every January, the world of consumer electronics heads to Las Vegas to spend the first full week of the year in the desert presenting, prodding, and gawking at all the new gadgets and gear debuting at CES. The show has once again delivered an avalanche of products, both innovative and vaporous, that will shape the industry in 2026.

The Verge’s team has been working around the clock to share the experience. Some of it wowed us while some of it weirded us out, but that’s part of the fun of CES.

You can’t shake a stick without hitting an AI gadget at CES this year, with artificial smarts now embedded in just about every wearable, screen, and appliance across the show floor, not to mention the armies of AI companions, toys, and robots.

But those are just the beginning. We’ve seen AI pop up in much stranger places too, from hair clippers to stick vacs, and at least one case where even the manufacturer itself seemed unsure what made its products “AI.”

This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

Every year, TV makers flock to CES in Las Vegas to show off bigger, brighter, and better-looking displays. And every year, the same companies also use the show to throw a bunch of spaghetti against the wall as they try to figure out how to sell those big TV sets to consumers busy watching TikTok videos on their phones.

CES is a land of bold announcements of amazing, innovative products and technologies that will revolutionize the world, often set for release in two years’ time. Twenty-four months seems to be about the right hype window: close enough to generate excitement and investment, but far enough that everyone forgets about your promises before that deadline quietly comes and goes.

It was CES 2018 when Henrik Fisker made such a proclamation, saying that his team of gurus had cracked the code of solid-state batteries. By 2020, he said, those batteries would be in mass production. The car was the EMotion, which never did come to market. By 2021, the company had given up on the solid-state dream, and by 2024, the whole operation went bust.

The personal computer has remained surprisingly resilient to change over the past 15 years. Apple promised a “post-PC” era with the iPad in 2010 and failed to deliver one. Smartphones even overtook laptops as the most popular device to connect to the internet a decade ago, but millions of people still kept buying PCs every year. But this PC resiliency is going to be tested even further this year.

RAM and NAND / SSD prices have surged in recent months due to shortages created by AI data center demand. Some stores have had to sell memory like it’s lobster, prebuilt PC costs have risen, and some assemblers are even selling PCs without RAM.

For all the time that I’ve been covering technology, there’s been a hierarchy when it comes to TV brands. The big three — Sony, Samsung, and LG — have been on top for a while. Pioneer and Panasonic were up there with plasma TVs, and Panasonic is getting back in the game in the States. Hisense, TCL, and Vizio battled it out as midrange tiers for years before Vizio pivoted from hardware profits to an ad-centric model under Walmart, leaving the other two to one-up each other by offering the most bang for the buck.

But over the past couple years, both TCL and Hisense have made impressive strides in performance, bringing them closer and closer to Sony, Samsung, and LG. And it’s not just that they made incremental improvements; both companies have been innovating and leading with technology. Hisense was the first company to debut an RGB LED TV last year (other companies were developing the technology, but Hisense showed it first). And this year TCL’s X11L leads the way as the first TV with reformulated quantum dots and a new color filter.

There are some things you can reliably expect to see at the Consumer Electronics Show every year. Companies will announce big splashy TVs, there’s going to be a bunch of new gadgets for charging your other gadgets, and the odds are good that a robot or two is going to hilariously malfunction.

But CES always manages to sneak in a few surprises, whether with what has been announced, what hasn’t made an appearance, and trends that no one saw coming. We’ve rounded up the biggest CES 2026 curveballs so far.

The first Wi-Fi 8 routers and chips made a surprise appearance at CES 2026, and could launch this year, only a couple of years after Wi-Fi 7 debuted. So, if you don’t already have a Wi-Fi 7 router — and many of us don’t — you might want to consider holding off on upgrading.

Rather than focusing on speed upgrades, Wi-Fi 8 promises improved stability. It offers the high speeds and bandwidth of Wi-Fi 7, but with improved power efficiency, higher throughput, and better peer-to-peer communication between devices. Wi-Fi 8 is also better at maintaining fast, stable connections when users are moving devices around, or moving them further away from their router. As a result, Wi-Fi 8 users will experience less “dropping out” or freezing and better streaming and gaming performance.

If you listen to the CES hype machine this year, you might think that robots are finally ready to take over your domestic duties. To some extent that’s true, but take note of the plural: there’s no single robot ready to take over all of your household chores yet, but an army of them just might.

You might have had one of these single-purpose robots in your home for years already, of course. Robot vacuum cleaners have long been capable of automating a single, specific task, and it’s no surprise that it’s the same companies behind those bots pushing home robots forward now.

Artificial intelligence doesn’t always want to optimize your life or steal your job. Sometimes, AI just wants to be your friend. And while robot pets weren’t the biggest stars of CES 2026, they’ve become more than just noise and are signaling how AI is apparently leaving our screens and taking on a physical presence in our lives.

To be clear, there’s no shortage of purpose-built machines on display in Las Vegas: there’s Samsung’s voice-controlled refrigerator, Bosch’s Alexa Plus-powered AI barista, and smarter robovacs like Narwal’s earring-finding Flow 2 or Anker’s Eufy S2, which moonlights as an aromatherapy diffuser – all promising to automate the drudgery of daily life. Humanoid robots like LG’s CLOiD and SwitchBot’s Onero H1 stole much of the spotlight, too, taking that logic a step further by promising more general-purpose helpers around the home — or the factory floor, in the case of Boston Dynamics’ Atlas — even if they remain years away from everyday use.

There was a time not too long ago when buying a power bank was as easy as choosing the cheapest portable battery that could charge your phone and quickly slip into your pocket, purse, or backpack. The hardest part was deciding whether it was time to ditch USB-A ports.

Recently, however, brands have been slathering on features, many of which are superfluous, in an attempt to both stand out from the commodified pack and justify higher price points. It’s especially prevalent amongst the bigger power banks that can also charge laptops, those that butt right up to the “airline friendly” 99Wh (around 27,650mAh) size limit.