Welcome to day one of our CES 2026 coverage. You can look forward to
getting CES tech news five days in a row instead of the regular three with
special guests in the midweek because in 2026 what happens in Vegas ends up on
the internet. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Hong took to the stage
at CES in his trademark leather jacket and basically said the future's robots
and we're building all of it. NVIDIA is building the robots and also the chips
those robots run on and also the software and also the simulation tools.
It's NVIDIA's all the way down. The headline is the Reuben platform. Their
nextg AI supercomputer with six integrated chips, including the Vera CPU
with 88 custom cores and a Reuben GPU packing 336 billion transistors, which
is more. NVIDIA claims five times the performance of Blackwell and a 10x
reduction in inference costs. They also unveiled Alpameo, which I thought was an
expensive mayonnaise brand, but it's apparently the first reasoning AI for
autonomous vehicles. Jensen showed a car navigating San Francisco supposedly
thinking through decisions in real time, which is more than I can say I do.
NVIDIA announced that they're open sourcing it, which either means they're
very confident or they want everyone else to do the bug testing. Talk about
lowering inference costs. But the real showstopper was when Star Wars BDX
droids walked on stage the exact same way they did last year, but this time
they were fully autonomous, trained on NVIDIA's Cosmos AI models. Partners like
Boston Dynamics, LG, and Caterpillar showed off robots running NVIDIA
silicon, which sounds impressive until you realize NVIDIA's entire business
model is now we sell the shovels in every gold rush simultaneously.
Autonomous cars, NVIDIA chips, humanoid robots, NVIDIA chips, AI data centers,
believe it or not, NVIDIA chips. I'm sure nothing can possibly go wrong with
a single company building the infrastructure that's propping up the
entirety of the US economy. Love it or hate it, though, at this point, one
thing's for sure. Jensen is building the cyberpunk dystopia that matches his
cooled leather jackets. I guess that's that's Mad Max. One big desert. There's
a phone with a robot arm now. Honor unveiled the robot phone. A device with
an actual threeaxis gimbal camera that pops out of the back like something out
of a Transformers movie. The camera can rotate 360°, track your face
autonomously, and basically turn your phone into a DJI Osmo that also calls
your mother or doesn't call her. Sorry.
Honors calling it part of their10 billion dollar alpha plan for AI
devices, which sounds like something a Transformers villain would announce
before Shia Labou shoved the All Spark into its shiny metal ass. No pricing yet
and it launches at Mobile World Congress in March, which isn't CES and we care
about CES. But if you've ever thought, "My phone needs more moving parts," then
this is your moment. And if you want the exact opposite, Clicks unveiled the
Communicator, a full Blackberry style phone with a 4-in AMOLED display,
minimalist UI, physical quarterty keyboard, headphone jack by Gustla, and
a fingerprint sensor in the space bar. It's $4.99, runs Android 16, and is
marketed as the best second phone on the planet because apparently one phone
isn't enough anxiety. Here's some more. Haning Toeal showed off what they're
calling the world's thinnest tablet. so thin it makes the iPad Pro look like
Kirby after inhaling an entire Panda Express. TCL brought back max ink mode
on their next page Paper 70 Pro to allow you to experience what it would be like
if the Pagemaster designed a smartphone. And Solver announced customizable
magnetic haptic buttons for phones, allowing you to bind whatever action or
string of actions you want, like quickly launching your I'm pooping at work timer
and making a new entry in your how much money do I make while pooping at work
spreadsheet. I'm up to 85 BUCKS IN 2026 ALREADY, BABY. Samsung brought some of
the literally biggest news at CS, showing off their massive 130in R95H
microRGB TV. Unfortunately, did they didn't provide pricing or availability
details for this wide boy. So, who knows when we'll get to see Linus try to plug
it into his house. But not only did Samsung unveil a big ass TV, they also
revealed a brightass TV with their 77in
Cutie OLED panel capable of reaching up to 4500 nits. Samsung touts it as the
world's brightest self- emissive display. Naturally, it's not tech in
2026 without AI in the mix. So, Samsung also revealed some new TV AI based
software. For example, AI Sound Controller Pro is going to let you mess
with the volume of background noise, including music and crowds to provide
you with a personalized listening experience. As a purist, I hate this.
Not to be left out of the CES fund, LG previewed their 2026 OLED TV lineup,
featuring the new G6 that boasts a more advanced tandem OLED panel with about
20% higher brightness and greatly reduced reflections. And the C6 series,
everyone's favorite, now upgraded to tandem OLED, big ass TVs, bright ass
TVs, and even flat ass TVs. LG also
showed off its ultra thin wallpaper OLED design with the LG OLED Evo W6, a
wireless 9mm thin OLED TV that sits flush to the wall and pairs with a
separate zero connect box. Finally, Amazon said, "We like flat TV, too." And
debuted the Ember Artline TV, a thin art
focused 4K lifestyle TV with a matte screen, customizable frames, and Amazon
photos integration that seems ready to directly compete with Samsung's Frame
TVs. Thank god cuz those they stink. You know, I've said it. Plus, Amazon is
kicking off 2026 with a major redesign of Fire TV's interface and mobile app
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We like to have fun here. The Quick Bits are angry they didn't get to go to Vegas
with the crew, but they keep it professional. They showed up today
focused and on task. By golly, Riley raised them right. Western Digital's WD
Blue and WD Black SSD branding is officially dead with SanDisk replacing
them with a unified SanDisk Optimus lineup. The new range introduces three
clear performance tiers: Optimus, Optimus GX, and Optimus GX Pro to better
differentiate mainstream gaming and high-end NVMe SSDs. I think I speak on
behalf of everyone when I demand to know if these drives can transform into a
truck or gorilla. If they can't, what are you even doing, SanDisk? More
companies are reacting to rising RAM prices. In an interview with Reuters,
Samsung co-CEO TM Row said that this
situation is unprecedented and no company is immune to its impact. Row
didn't dismiss the possibility of increasing product prices, noting that
some effect was inevitable. Outside of CES, that inevitable impact is already
here with Taiwanese retailers already raising laptop prices by roughly 15 to
20% following ASUS's announcement of higher notebook and gaming PC prices
starting January 5th. That's today.
To be clear, we're not just talking about Asus. Laptops from Acer, HP, Dell,
MSI, and Gigabyte have all seen price increases. At least, Taiwanese retailers
aren't copying Corsair, who sparked backlash by cancelling confirmed orders
for DDR5 RAM kits due to a pricing
mistake and lack of stock, but then relisted them at much higher prices
before offering apology coupons that were already expired. High performance
RAM, terrible customer service. AI is everywhere at CES 2026 with a ton of
stuff leaving us asking why is this even a thing. First and almost certainly most
importantly, Amazon's Alexa Plus finally went public in early access. But AI's
also showing up in Bosch coffee machines. Samsung teased its wild AI
OLED cassette player and turntable, blissfully bringing AI into a scene
usually occupied by people trying not to deal with AI. GE unveiled its smartest
fridge ever [laughter] with a built-in barcode scanner for
effortless grocery shopping. And AI even snuck into an ice cube machine. We're
reaching a rule 34- like moment here. If something exists, there's a version of
it with AI built in. The shareholders are titillated. The PR nightmare
continues for XAI as multiple countries are now investigating the organization
in the aftermath of Grock generating sexually explicit images of women and
minors. France, Malaysia, and India have all either opened investigations or
issued orders to the company after Grock was caught generating CSAM. [music] X's
response, it allowed Grock to issue a user prompted heartfelt apology from the
Grock account, which was somewhat undercut by the fact that it had also
issued a user prompted statement that it was absolutely not sorry, telling users
that it's revolutionizing tech, not babysitting sensitivities. India gave X
72 hours to fix it or lose legal immunity from liability for user
generated content. Meaning X would be legally liable for all the content
people post on the platform, which could result in Elon Musk getting sued by
Nintendo over all the Super Mario Brothers fan art I posted back in high
school. A lot of chemicals in my body back then. Microsoft has quietly killed
phone activation for Windows and Office, forcing everyone into online only
activation tied to a Microsoft account.
We're done here, boys. The support site still lists phone activation as an
option, but if you call the number, you'll get a message saying support for
product activation has moved online, as YouTuber Ben Kleinberg discovered. So,
if you're trying to activate Windows on an old machine without the internet,
your offline alternative, according to Microsoft, is now going online. I know
people say this every year, but this might actually be the year of the Linux
desktop. Man, all this talk of Linux in Vegas has me in a gambling mood. I'm
hitting the casino. Don't forget to come back tomorrow for even more CES
coverage. That's right, five sites of tech news, BABY. JESUS. LINE THEM UP.