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 Huang took to the stage at CES in his trademark leather jacket
and basically said the future is 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 Rubin platform, their next gen AI supercomputer
with six integrated chips, including the Vera CPU with 88 custom cores
and a Rubin 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.
Talked 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 cool leather jackets.
I guess 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 three-axis gimbal camera that pops out of the back
like something out of a Transformers movie. The camera can rotate 360 degrees,
track your face autonomously, and basically turn your phone into a DJI Osmo
that also calls your mother, or doesn't call her, sorry.
Honor's calling it part of their $10 billion alpha plan for AI devices, which sounds like something
a Transformers villain would announce before Shia LaBeouf 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 four-inch AMOLED display, minimalist UI,
physical QWERTY key-barred, headphone jack microSD slot,
and a fingerprint sensor in the space bar. It's 499, 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.
Haining Toa'al 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 NextPage Paper 70 Pro
to allow you to experience what it would be like if the page master 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 CES,
showing off their massive 130-inch R95H microRGB TV.
Unfortunately, they didn't provide pricing or availability deals 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 bright-ass TV
with their 77-inch QT OLED panel capable of reaching up to 4,500 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 gonna let you mess with the volume of background noise,
including music and crowds, to bride you with a personalized listening experience.
As a purist, I hate this. Not to be left out of the CES Fun, LG previewed their 2026 OLED TV line-up
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 wall-paper OLED design
with the LG OLED EVO W6, a wireless, nine-millimeter-thin OLED TV
that sits flush to the wall in pairs with a separate zero-connect box.
Finally, Amazon said, we like that 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, because those, they stink, you know? I've said it.
Plus, Amazon is kicking off 2026 with a major redesign to Fire TV's interface
and mobile app that's meant to be cleaner, faster and easier to navigate.
Now, let me usher you to our sponsor. 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. Bad Goliath Raleigh 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 Rowe, said that this situation
is unprecedented and no company is immune to its impact.
Rowe 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 tea.
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 re-listed 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, using the occupied way of people trying not to deal with AI.
GE unveiled its smartest fridge ever.
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 GROC
generating sexually explicit images of women and minors.
France, Malaysia, and India have all either open investigations
or issued orders to the company after GROC was caught generating CSAM.
X's response, it allowed GROC to issue a user-prompted heartfelt apology from the GROC 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 and Vixx 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 nights of tech news, baby.
Line them up.