I can not neglect the largest TV I’ve ever seen. Deep inside a conference middle in Las Vegas, a Samsung PR consultant calmly ushered me previous staff organising for the night occasion. They have been making ready for Samsung’s First Look, the annual unveiling of the corporate’s most bold house leisure {hardware} for the approaching yr. A whole bunch of journalists and trade insiders would quickly have entry, however I used to be getting a behind-the-scenes preview.
We moved previous kiosks in midconstruction dedicated to PC displays, sensible TV options and wacky shows constructed into modernist bookshelves. I brushed by the Sero, a TV that might rotate its display screen into portrait mode. Then, behind the half-constructed stage, I noticed it: The Wall, 292 inches of micro-LED glory, brighter than any film display screen and a lot bigger than life.
That was at CES, the world’s largest tech occasion, in 2020. Yearly, Samsung is likely one of the present’s most vital exhibitors of shopper electronics, and I knew that its large TV could be the speak of my trade. Because it towered over me, I felt like I used to be a part of know-how historical past.
I have been attending CES for many of my grownup life. Excluding the primary two years of the COVID pandemic, I’ve gone yearly since 1999. I fly to Vegas in January proper after the vacations to hustle for a stable week. There, alongside lots of of different journalists and my CNET colleagues, I write articles and shoot movies in regards to the coolest devices on the planet. Powerful gig, I do know.
Big TVs stay probably the most recognizable symbols of CES, they usually’ve solely grown in significance for the reason that introduction of HDTV broadcasts in 1998.
“HDTV was the largest factor in my lifetime for video, no query about it,” says Gary Shapiro, president of the CTA. “HDTV basically modified the viewing expertise.”
However there’s much more to CES than TVs. Over time, the buyer electronics extravaganza has been the place we first received a glimpse of know-how that we use each day — recreation consoles, cutting-edge telephones, even streaming providers — in addition to extra futuristic tech, together with humanoid robots, AI-powered laundry machines, and personal electric aircraft. CES is the place hundreds of corporations debut their splashiest improvements, and it is probably the most vital predictors of the subsequent massive tech pattern.
And despite the fact that bellwether corporations like Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta and Samsung hype their very own occasions and livestreams all year long to launch main merchandise, CES has endured.
Different main commerce reveals have come and gone. Comdex, which ran from 1979 to 2003 and was additionally primarily based in Vegas, showcased the pc know-how of the day, competing directly against CES. E3, an enormous online game trade occasion spawned from CES, befell yearly from 1995 to 2021. A handful of worldwide know-how commerce reveals, together with Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, IFA in Berlin and Computex in Taipei, are nonetheless going robust, however CES stays king.
We are able to see the affect of the present on TVs, VCRs, recreation consoles and PDAs. These 4 gadgets, every with a wealthy historical past at CES, have a tech legacy that continues to push ahead.
CNET has a protracted historical past at CES. Teaming up with the Shopper Know-how Affiliation, which hosts the huge present, we have bestowed the official Better of CES Award on a handful of choose merchandise. This yr, we did it once more, now along with our colleagues at PCMag, ZDNET, Mashable and different Ziff Davis publications. Our picks for the Best of CES 2026 got here from our exhaustive assessment of an array of laptops, robots, home tech, wellness tech, TVs and far more.
The subsequent wave of household robotics, driverless cars, high-tech elder care and musical lollipops, together with different gadgets, providers and applied sciences, nonetheless of their formative phases, was on show on the present. It is likely to be years earlier than they’re inexpensive, accessible and helpful sufficient to turn into a part of our lives.
The highway from wild idea to family mainstay is lengthy and fraught with many lifeless ends, however it usually begins at CES.
CES 1967: To start with, there have been TVs
The very first CES — on the time, it glided by its full identify, the Shopper Electronics Present — befell in New York Metropolis in 1967. It attracted 117 exhibitors, which is tiny by right now’s requirements. By comparability, CES 2025 featured greater than 4,500 exhibitors and drew 142,465 attendees, and pre-COVID reveals have been even bigger.
The inaugural CES was a derivative of one other technology-focused commerce occasion, the Chicago Music Present, the place audio know-how confirmed up within the type of pocket radios.
From the beginning, CES featured TVs. Invented lengthy earlier than the Sixties, that decade noticed the adoption of shade tv broadcasts within the US and the launch of TV satellites.
On the 1967 CES, probably the most cutting-edge TVs displayed have been these with built-in circuits, a know-how that mixes a number of digital elements right into a small “chip,” or microchip — the stuff that ultimately would turn into the center of each laptop computer and smartphone. Throughout that present and for many years afterward, most TVs used a cathode ray tube, or CRT, which made the screens small and the units heavy. After we have been children, my sister and I sat a few ft from our tube TV at house to look at cartoons, regardless of our mother and father’ warnings that sitting too shut would wreck our eyesight.
Irrespective of the period, the best TV is all the time one thing larger, one thing that guarantees to convey the immersive, magical really feel of a movie show into a house. Throughout my profession, I’ve watched TVs develop and enhance, yr after yr, with greater decision, higher distinction, extra real looking shade and brightness, chasing actuality in constancy and measurement.
A 2025 CNET survey discovered folks do certainly crave large screens. Almost half of the respondents mentioned that if cash have been no object, they’d desire a TV larger than 65 inches of their houses.
“Lots of people ask what measurement TV ought to I purchase, and I all the time inform folks to purchase one measurement larger than you assume you want,” Chris Hamdorf, govt vice chairman at TV maker TCL, informed CNET in 2025. As a TV reviewer, I give folks the same advice, however there was a time when 65-inch TVs have been removed from widespread.
Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, larger-screen televisions hit the market utilizing a know-how just like film projectors. Referred to as rear-projection TVs, the projector was housed contained in the TV cupboard and created a picture from behind the display screen. Additionally they used CRTs then, and in later iterations, an acronym-heavy array of different applied sciences (assume DLP, LCD and LCoS). Quite a few rear-projection TVs outlined my first few years masking CES earlier than they have been changed by flat-panel know-how, usually skinny and light-weight sufficient to hold on a wall, a harbinger of the screens we use right now for our Netflix marathon classes.
CES 2026: These 32 Tech Merchandise Made A few of the Largest Impressions
Plasma know-how arrived in 1995 with the world’s first large (42-inch) plasma show by Fujitsu, and at CES 1997, Philips showcased the primary commercially accessible model. The know-how developed in succeeding years however remained costly by right now’s requirements — in 2005, Toshiba bought a 42-inch plasma for $4,500, for instance. Just some years later, plasma hit mainstream pricing and have become very recommendable.
In 2010, the Best of CES award went to the primary plasma TV with 3D functionality, the Panasonic V10, which was chosen by a gaggle of CNET journalists, together with myself. We met in CNET’s double-wide trailer within the convention middle parking zone and debated our strategy to the very best total winner. I touted the very good image high quality of earlier Panasonic plasmas I might reviewed, together with a promising new 3D video, full with glasses. Oops! Inside just a few years, that idea was a strolling corpse, and I commented on its death in 2017.
LCD-based shows have been evolving on the identical time, and that know-how quickly outsold each plasma and different nonflat applied sciences. With the arrival of 4K decision, plasma know-how turned much less fashionable and it left the market altogether by 2014. LCD has been the dominant TV know-how ever since.
These days, CES is awash in huge screens, though none are fairly as giant because the 292-inch micro-LED TV that impressed me a lot. At CES 2024, I used to be notably enamored by the 132-inch, $200,000 folding TV by C-Seed. LG’s sales space is one other spectacular instance, with its unimaginable OLED multiscreen displays. However innovation in TVs has actually slowed down, as bigger TVs with wonderful picture high quality have become increasingly affordable over time.
“To be trustworthy with you, the significance of TV at CES is unquestionably diminished,” CTA’s Shapiro says. “As a result of it’s such an incredible shopper product that it is nearly cheaper than wallpaper now.”
CES 1970: A $13,000 VCR units the stage for reasonable streaming
For so long as TVs have existed, they’ve seemingly delivered the identical primary idea: a display screen with video and sound that you simply look ahead to leisure at house. Different groundbreaking know-how concepts, nevertheless, have developed considerably over a brief interval.
In 1970, simply three years into the historical past of CES, Philips showcased the N1500 VCR. It will be the primary machine that recorded TV reveals onto cassette tapes. Initially a chunk {of professional} broadcast gear, it hit the UK market in 1972, the place it bought for £600 — the equal of round $13,000 right now. It had a built-in TV tuner to file tv applications broadcast over the air in addition to an analog clock that routinely initiated recordings.
“The VCR was vital on so many various ranges,” Shapiro tells me. “It modified the idea of TV. It empowered customers to decide on what they need to watch and after they need to watch it.”
The concept you can “time shift” to look at a present at a later time was revolutionary, ultimately reworking house leisure endlessly. Till then, tv programming had set broadcast instances. To expertise “appointment TV,” you needed to observe a present’s schedule in the intervening time it aired. With the flexibility to file and archive video independently, folks took extra possession of their leisure.
The format utilized by the N1500 was truly referred to as “VCR,” however it was by no means efficiently marketed within the US, opening the door for 2 different codecs: Betamax (launched by Sony) and VHS (developed by JVC). Betamax hit the market in 1975, the yr I used to be born, and was seen by many as technically superior to VHS, with higher picture high quality. My father was a Beta man and took nice satisfaction in his assortment of recorded Disney films.
VHS launched at CES in 1977. It used a bigger cassette tape than Beta and promised longer recording instances (2 hours versus 1 hour). Over the subsequent few years, the 2 incompatible codecs and their gadgets — each now referred to as VCRs — battled it out out there, one-upping one another in advertising, model assist and technological innovation, resembling recording lengths.
“There was a format battle occurring between VHS and Beta,” Shapiro says. “And it was intense.”
Over time, Betamax gross sales declined as extra households adopted VHS. By 1988, 170 million VCRs had been bought worldwide, with solely 13% being Betamax fashions. Sony additionally introduced that it could manufacture VHS VCRs. The format battle was successfully over.
The VCR had a 40-year reign, characterised by Blockbuster video rental shops and their reminders to “be sort, rewind.” However the know-how of house video was about to get a digital makeover.
The DVD format delivered superior picture high quality in a smaller, extra sturdy disc that did not require rewinding. It additionally allowed recording by way of DVD-R discs. Across the identical time, a disc-free machine made its debut: the DVR. It proved far more fashionable than DVD-R for recording TV reveals and flicks.
TiVo and Replay TV have been among the many first DVRs, gadgets that saved lots of of hours of TV reveals and enabled computerized recording to a tough disc. With a DVR, the “work” of programming recordings was a lot simpler. You could possibly merely point out that you simply wished to file each new episode of The Simpsons, and the DVR would do it routinely. There have been no discs to trouble with, so you did not have to fret about damaging them.
DVRs additionally allowed you to fast-forward by way of commercials and skip forward in 15- or 30-second increments. Some even included the flexibility to skip previous commercials routinely with out having to press a button in any respect. A type of DVRs, the Dish Community Hopper, debuted at CES and was named the 2013 Better of CES winner by CNET.
Till it wasn’t. The corporate that owned CNET on the time, CBS, was within the means of suing Dish over its commercial-skipping capabilities. CBS intervened in the awards process and instructed CNET’s editorial workers to pick out another winner as a substitute.
“Once I heard that CNET gave an award and CBS reversed it, that will need to have been devastating to the workers,” Shapiro tells me. “Then I spotted that is, like, a present. That is gonna get extra publicity than ever.” He wrote a column for USA As we speak, headlined “CBS orders crush CNET credibility.” The reversal sparked a controversy that CNET veterans like me bear in mind for instance of company pursuits overstepping editorial integrity.
DVRs stay a staple in US households right now, sometimes bought by cable TV corporations. However as extra People ditch their cable subscriptions and change them with streaming providers, DVRs have moved to the cloud. The primary stay TV streaming service, Sling TV, debuted at CES 2015 with a $20 package deal that included channels resembling ESPN, CNN, TNT and Disney Channel. I mentioned on the time that it stole the show and presaged a brand new period of cutting the cable TV cord.
As we speak, Sling and its rivals — YouTube TV, Hulu Plus Reside TV and extra — all supply cloud DVRs. They allow you to file TV reveals routinely and watch them each time and wherever, they usually even allow you to fast-forward by way of commercials. However you may must press a button to take action.
Past TV reveals and flicks, one other sort of leisure shares a wealthy historical past of CES debuts. It received its begin on tv at house however has moved quickly into transportable codecs and even digital actuality. I am speaking about video video games.
CES 1977: The Atari 2600 is no matter occurred to Pong
Debuting at CES on June 4, 1977, the long-lasting Atari 2600 console launched the house online game trade. The announcement of the console was a little bit of a shock. Attendees on the present anticipated the massive information to contain the debut of the VHS format.
The 2600 is not the primary house console (a distinction that belongs to the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972), however Atari’s was the primary to go mainstream. Atari was based in 1972, and its breakthrough recreation, Pong, is broadly thought-about the earliest profitable online game. Originating as a stand-up arcade recreation, Pong then made its strategy to house consoles, together with the House Pong, a TV-connected console that was launched at CES in 1974.
Highlights for n00bs: Wanting again on 40 years of gaming
Atari staff included Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who quickly went on to discovered Apple. In 1974, that they had teamed as much as develop one other seminal recreation, Breakout. Atari was bought to Warner Communications in 1976 for $28 million to fund the event of a tool code-named VCS (Video Laptop System), which was ultimately renamed the Atari 2600.
Video video games have been new on the time and playable on devoted arcade machines. Very similar to the VCR, a house recreation console was a TV accent that opened up one other world with out requiring you to depart the home. Permitting customers to work together with the display screen and management the contents, in addition to compete in opposition to one other participant, was groundbreaking.
Gaming has since developed to embody quite a few different programs and platforms, extending past the confines of TVs to incorporate computer systems, telephones, VR headsets and extra. It is in every single place and extra fashionable than ever, and CES has performed proper alongside.
“We have been essential to the sport trade. We had Nintendo and Sony and Sega,” Shapiro says, including, “I bear in mind the man from Atari was on our board.”
The 2600 was an enormous hit, outselling its preliminary manufacturing run in 1977 and ultimately promoting 30 million models worldwide. My uncle and aunt purchased it for the household one Christmas, and I vividly recall hours spent with my youthful cousins — and the adults — as we sat mesmerized, kicking butts in Defender, Fight and House Invaders. Protected to say I used to be hooked on gaming, together with tens of millions of different folks.
Atari continues to be round right now and even launched the throwback Atari 2600 Plus a few years in the past, however different corporations and gadgets have dominated gaming for the reason that early Nineteen Eighties. In 1985, Nintendo unveiled the NES, or Nintendo Leisure System, on the June CES. I purchased the console with my paper-route cash and hid it from my father, who did not approve of video video games.
Nintendo is considered probably the most influential recreation gadgets ever. It featured add-ons just like the Zapper gentle gun and launched Nintendo’s best-known franchises, together with Mario, Metroid and Zelda. Quite a few TV-based and handheld successors adopted, culminating within the Nintendo Swap, the primary hit console to mix each at-home and transportable gaming right into a single machine.
“CES all the time felt somewhat off-timed for gaming in comparison with E3’s late-spring gaming reveals, however it’s nonetheless been a spot the place new gaming tech has pushed the envelope,” says CNET Editor at Giant Scott Stein, who’s been attending CES reveals since 2004. “The Razer Edge gaming pill gave a preview of the place the Swap was later heading, all the best way again in 2013.”
One other fashionable recreation console additionally received its begin at CES. In 2001, Invoice Gates, CEO of Microsoft, revealed the ultimate design of the pc firm’s first foray into console gaming — and the primary main console produced by an American firm since Atari. It was referred to as the Xbox.
In a memorably over-the-top CES keynote address, Gates took the stage with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, then knowledgeable wrestler, to hype up the machine. Gates pulled apart a black material with the phrases: “For the primary time, let me unveil Xbox.” The placing black monolith with neon inexperienced highlights had an enormous “X” embossed on prime and an enormous wired controller.
Microsoft aimed to compete with Sony’s profitable PlayStation console and added comparable options to the Xbox, together with a broadband connection and the flexibility to play CD-ROMs and DVD films. The Xbox was the primary console with a hard-disc drive, which presaged fashionable gaming consoles. (Variations of the present PlayStation 5 and Xbox Sequence S lack disc drives altogether and depend on video games downloaded to the laborious disc.)
The Xbox was additionally massively profitable, partly due to the recognition of one in every of its launch titles — Halo: Fight Advanced — however it by no means matched the recognition of its direct competitor, Sony’s PlayStation 2. The Xbox versus PlayStation rivalry continues to today, with Microsoft and Sony buying and selling unique titles, shopping for recreation studios and matching each other spec for spec.
The unique Xbox was the final main console announcement at CES. The present’s relevance for gaming was eclipsed by E3, a competing conference in Los Angeles that attracted recreation builders and different {hardware} makers.
“That is positively one in every of my largest profession failures, once we misplaced that section,” Shapiro says once I ask about gaming. “We made some unhealthy choices, they usually created E3, which has gone by way of a life cycle of its personal.”
Nonetheless, CES has remained an vital venue for gaming {hardware} debuts. PC makers, chipmakers like Nvidia and VR and AR corporations, together with Oculus — now folded into Meta — nonetheless debut merchandise in Vegas. In the meantime, massive gaming corporations launching consoles have opted to dribble information and rumors out over months, culminating in devoted occasions just like the PS5 showcase in 2020 and Nintendo Direct for the Switch 2 earlier this yr.
The transfer towards launching vital tech merchandise at separate, company-specific occasions has actually diminished the significance of CES over time. No firm illustrates that pattern greater than Apple.
CES 1992: Apple drops Newton, a failed precursor to the iPhone
Very similar to its on-again, off-again relationship with gaming corporations, CES is not actually a telephone present right now. That title belongs to the Cell World Congress. But even the MWC performs second fiddle to the person telephone launches placed on by massive cell corporations: Samsung Unpacked, the Google Pixel occasion and, most significantly, the Apple iPhone occasion. That is the place potential telephone patrons and tech journalists collect to get all the main points in regards to the yr’s latest cell gear.
In 1992, 15 years earlier than Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at Apple’s press event, the corporate attended its first CES. Apple’s CEO on the time was John Sculley, and the machine he unveiled was referred to as the Newton MessagePad. Sculley hailed it as “nothing lower than a revolution,” and it marked the pc firm’s first new product line for the reason that introduction of the Macintosh.
The Newton was extremely bold at the moment, and it isn’t tough to see a straight evolutionary line from the MessagePad to the iPhone. Apple referred to as it a PDA, for private digital assistant. The Newton was a handheld and transportable machine, dominated by a big display screen, and was designed to assist customers take notes, manage contacts, calendars and extra. It allowed folks to learn ebooks greater than a decade earlier than Amazon launched the Kindle. A Newton commercial boasted: “Ship faxes with out paper and obtain pager messages and e mail.”
In the end, nevertheless, the Newton was a market failure. Its chief function was handwriting recognition — the machine might convert phrases written on the display screen with an included stylus into textual content. That function did not work effectively, usually failing to precisely convert even easy phrases to textual content, and was famously skewered by the Doonesbury comic strip. For a glorified notepad, the Newton itself was means too costly, beginning at $700 when it hit the market in 1993, which might be greater than $1,500 right now.
Different PDAs on the time included the IBM Simon and the Nokia 9000, each of which featured early cellular telephone performance. Units like BlackBerry and handhelds working tiny cell variations of Microsoft Home windows additionally appeared across the mid-Nineteen Nineties, however early smartphones — mainly, PDAs with mobile know-how in-built — rapidly overcame them. Some of the buzzworthy merchandise of CES 2009 was the Palm Pre, a smartphone utilizing the corporate’s brand-new WebOS cell software program. The Pre won CNET’s Best in Show and the Folks’s Voice Award, cementing its place in CES historical past.
“Palm knew precisely what it was doing utilizing CES to launch a comeback telephone with a daring new OS,” remembers Jessica Dolcourt, now CNET’s vice chairman of content material, who was, on the time, an editor masking cell know-how. “It was a superb play that mentioned the Pre wasn’t ‘simply’ a telephone — it was as consequential and dazzling as any TV or gaming laptop computer.”
The Pre introduced one thing recent and new to smartphones at a time of large distinction and variety, Dolcourt says. “I couldn’t wait to get my arms on it.”
Apple, in the meantime, made sporadic appearances at CES however more and more appeared to treat the sprawling, splashy occasion as a direct rival for its consideration within the tech world. Certainly one of my most vivid CES reminiscences was in 2011 once we realized that the iPhone was coming to Verizon. Apple made the massive announcement in New York throughout CES, utterly upstaging the Vegas conference. In later years, Apple appeared at CES to discuss privacy and to introduce AirPlay to TVs, amongst different initiatives, however none of its CES bulletins might evaluate to the impression of the Newton.
“John Sculley was a keynote speaker,” Shapiro says. “Steve Jobs by no means was. And once I requested him about it, he mentioned, ‘Like to keynote. Simply transfer it to San Francisco and name it Macworld.'”
CES 2026: What’s subsequent for tech historical past
If there’s any lesson I’ve realized from CES in any case these years masking the present, it is that flashy tech concepts can take longer than you may count on to turn into part of our on a regular basis lives, if they do at all. In every of the circumstances above, the gadgets that have been first launched didn’t instantly revolutionize the market on their very own. It took years and intense competitors to determine a “winner.”
And so they’re not the one examples. I did not point out camcorders, CDs, Windows Media Center, Blu-ray versus HD-DVD, SACD versus DVD-Audio, 4G, smartwatches or Impossible Pork.
The 2026 version of CES is now within the books. As tech giants maintain their very own occasions, and improvements shift more and more from the world of bodily {hardware} (telephones, laptops and TVs) to digital software program (apps, social media and AI), the decades-old query arises: Does CES even matter anymore?
In case you ask the nearly 150,000 people who attended this yr, the reply is inappropriate. CES is right here, steeped in historical past, and it is certain to be full of futuristic, bold and bizarre new know-how. It is nearly actually going to be round subsequent yr, too.
So I say move the unattainable lobster and level me to the flying robotic AI vehicles.
Visible Designer | Lily Yeh
Artwork Director | Jeffrey Hazelwood
Artistic Director | Viva Tung
Video Presenter | David Katzmeier
Video Editor | JD Christison
Venture Supervisor | Danielle Ramirez
Editors | Corinne Reichert
Director of Content material | Jonathan Skillings
