CES 2026 technically won't end until tomorrow, but if this were a football match, it would be the kind of match where the home team suffers a 4-0 defeat as the cameras continue to show a stream of season ticket holders streaming towards the doors with 20 minutes remaining. He was not the record holder in the history of the Consumer Electronics Show.
You can probably guess why. If CES 2024 and CES 2025 were characterized by tightening coverage of gaming hardware artificial intelligence2026 looks set to be the year it undergoes complete AI Brain adopt. A practical and sensible package was announced, but more than ever it was relegated to footnotes, pushed to the side so that the focus could remain on questionably useful (if not downright useless) products and services that use the shareholder community's favorite acronym.
Nowhere was this more evident than AMD's keynote, a bizarre two-hour corporate carousel in which guest celebrity executives took turns (like a Gorillaz album produced by Mark Zuckerberg) to give mock interviews with CEO Dr. Lisa Su about all the cool and certainly not fictional things AI could do in the future. Along the way, some real consumer-grade laptop processors have been revealed, with the “Ryzen AI 400” series name apparently forming a convincing enough disguise to allow it to slip among all the other processors. The future of technology pat on the back.
Keep in mind, it was only about three minutes or a fraction of the time that Dr. Su spent talking with her companions. Friends like OpenAI CEO Greg Brockman, whose ChatGPT bot has been busy. encouragement of suicideor Trump's science adviser Michael Kratsios, who has demonstrated his commitment to scientific understanding, reduction in US research funding. “What are the most important things we need to do to succeed and become leaders in artificial intelligence?” Dr. Su asks, immediately met with classic libertarian dog whistles about removing “regulatory barriers to innovation.” Buddy, did you see this? DLC trailer for Ark: Survival Evolved? I'm not sure it's a matter of regulation.
CES, as a trade show, can count itself lucky that this keynote didn't completely set the tone for the rest of the event. Because here's the thing: this year's event actually had quite a few interesting, desirable, or otherwise positive developments. They've just had their oxygen sucked out of them by the AI's nonsense.
You may have seen me spend my entire life on some of these: Lenovo's version of Legion Go 2 for SteamOS This is probably my personal “Oh, this is great” metric, while Nvidia's public release DLSS 4.5 scaling was a pleasant surprise. (It does use machine learning, but in a limited and almost completely unsophisticated way, allowing it to distance itself from the current “GenAI will save us” zeitgeist.) After the delays, Nvidia also launched G-Sync Pulsar, essentially a new form of monitor backlight strobing that works with adaptive synchronization systems to eliminate blur and ghosting effects in fast-paced games—even on adaptive refresh rate screens that never worked well with previous backlight strobing attempts. We will see the first monitors compatible with Pulsar on shelves in February.
Meanwhile, Intel introduced the Panther Lake family of laptop processors. The Core Ultra 3 series, as it's officially called, wouldn't normally be a source of much intrigue, but its advances in integrated graphics sound pretty tasty: their Arc B390 GPU is said to be 77% faster than the previous generation Arc 140V. Moreover, Intel has confirmed that the Panther Lake chip is specifically for pocket computers is in progress. This is important news because one of the most powerful portable devices available right now is MSI Claw 8 AI+which is powered by… Arc 140V. Promising stuff.
Dell, to its credit, has consciously resisted the “AI PC” branding on its new Alienware systems and monitors, under the leadership of product chief Kevin Terwilliger. confession that home PC owners “don't buy AI.” Such heretical claims went unnoticed by other exhibitors long enough for Dell to also announce the revival of its XPS line of business laptops, which, if you'll pardon the slight digression into gaming hardware, is the computing equivalent of the repeal of prohibition on Christmas Day 1660. I still think the 2015 XPS 13 is the nicest laptop I've ever used.
There will be other niche pieces of happiness to be found at CES 2026, such as mechanical keyboards. Cherry bounces back after the recent plant closure with their first line of fast, wear resistant magnetic key switch 'boards. And of course there was AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3Dwill likely become the processor of choice for high-end PC builds when it launches later this year.
Not that you'd know it existed if you listened to AMD's slightly villainous talk – two hours and this supposed flagship chip wasn't mentioned even once. Couldn't we spare a few minutes of authoritarian sycophancy and make room for the real product? Was it just too much to ask rocket company guy Jeff Bezos to share his runtime with something that might be of more interest to professionals?
Apparently, yes, and many other manufacturers also could not restrain themselves. DLSS 4.5 and G-Sync Pulsar, two genuine attempts to solve technical problems with the sole purpose of making games more enjoyable, were meant to coexist with the announcement of Dynamic MFG, another version of Nvidia's latency-inducing AI. frame generation those. Not to mention further experiments using Nvidia ACE. the consistently stilted and clunky world of AI NPCs. Last try: adding a personalityless “advisor” to Total War: Pharaohwhich is functionally a VRAM-intensive search engine wearing a funny hat.
Intel also buried their potentially world's best portable APU under slides of buzzwords about AI computing power and what a “hybrid agent scheduler” is, and even though Razer had a new version of their brilliant Bluetooth-enabled device Wolverine V3 Controllerthey may have leaned more towards conceptual silliness than any other gaming peripheral maker at the show. Heading number one: ABA Projectan AI “tabletop companion” featuring a holographic anime cat-girl (or, creepily, a real-life image) League of Legends pro Faker) can be made to bark at you with basic FPS tactics. Number two: Project Motoko, which can be charitably described as an Apple Vision Pro that looks like a pair of headphones. Its applications, shown so far only in carefully edited mock-ups, include summing up the pages of the book you're reading, which conveniently saves you from having to read the book, and also somehow stores and accesses facial recognition data from strangers.
CES has always had an overly ambitious, maybe even frantic energy, with floors filled with flying cars and smart bathtubs. But over the last few shows, that unintentional comedic quackery has given way to something darker. Something still based on overpromising fantasies, but no longer possessing the sincere charm of hopeful inventors. Instead, AI is revered with religious fervor by people who don't just claim that You he needs this – the world itself must change around him. So we have a consumer electronics show where consumer electronics take a backseat to the rich and powerful people on stage agreeing with each other about how bad the legal guarantees are. If at all, these electronics deserve a mention at all.
