I can not neglect the most important TV I’ve ever seen. Deep inside a conference middle in Las Vegas, a Samsung PR consultant calmly ushered me previous employees establishing for the night occasion. They have been getting ready for Samsung’s First Look, the annual unveiling of the corporate’s most bold dwelling leisure {hardware} for the approaching 12 months. A whole bunch of journalists and business 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 would rotate its display 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 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 essential exhibitors of shopper electronics, and I knew that its large TV could be the discuss of my business. Because it towered over me, I felt like I used to be a part of expertise historical past.
I have been attending CES for many of my grownup life. Except for 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 a whole bunch of different journalists and my CNET colleagues, I write articles and shoot movies concerning the coolest devices on the planet. Robust gig, I do know.
Large TVs stay some of the recognizable symbols of CES, and so they’ve solely grown in significance because the introduction of HDTV broadcasts in 1998.
“HDTV was the most important 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 bought a glimpse of expertise that we use each day — recreation consoles, cutting-edge telephones, even streaming companies — in addition to extra futuristic tech, together with humanoid robots, AI-powered laundry machines, and personal electric aircraft. CES is the place 1000’s of firms debut their splashiest improvements, and it is some of the essential predictors of the following large tech pattern.
And although bellwether firms 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 exhibits have come and gone. Comdex, which ran from 1979 to 2003 and was additionally primarily based in Vegas, showcased the pc expertise of the day, competing directly against CES. E3, an enormous online game business occasion spawned from CES, befell yearly from 1995 to 2021. A handful of worldwide expertise commerce exhibits, together with Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, IFA in Berlin and Computex in Taipei, are nonetheless going sturdy, 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 an extended 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 12 months, we did it once more, now at the side of our colleagues at PCMag, ZDNET, Mashable and different Ziff Davis publications. Our picks for the Best of CES 2026 got here from our exhaustive evaluation 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, companies and applied sciences, nonetheless of their formative levels, was on show on the present. It may be years earlier than they’re reasonably priced, accessible and helpful sufficient to grow to be a part of our lives.
The highway from wild idea to family mainstay is lengthy and fraught with many lifeless ends, nevertheless it typically begins at CES.
CES 1967: At first, there have been TVs
The very first CES — on the time, it glided by its full title, the Shopper Electronics Present — befell in New York Metropolis in 1967. It attracted 117 exhibitors, which is tiny by at this time’s requirements. By comparability, CES 2025 featured greater than 4,500 exhibitors and drew 142,465 attendees, and pre-COVID exhibits have been even bigger.
The inaugural CES was a derivative of one other technology-focused commerce occasion, the Chicago Music Present, the place audio expertise 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 colour 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 expertise that mixes a number of digital parts right into a small “chip,” or microchip — the stuff that ultimately would grow to be 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. Once we have been children, my sister and I sat a few ft from our tube TV at dwelling to observe cartoons, regardless of our mother and father’ warnings that sitting too shut would damage our eyesight.
Irrespective of the period, the best TV is at all times one thing larger, one thing that guarantees to deliver the immersive, magical really feel of a movie show into a house. Throughout my profession, I’ve watched TVs broaden and enhance, 12 months after 12 months, with larger decision, higher distinction, extra sensible colour and brightness, chasing actuality in constancy and dimension.
A 2025 CNET survey discovered folks do certainly crave large screens. Practically 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 dimension TV ought to I purchase, and I at all times inform folks to purchase one dimension larger than you suppose you want,” Chris Hamdorf, government vice chairman at TV maker TCL, advised 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.
In the course of the ’80s and ’90s, larger-screen televisions hit the market utilizing a expertise just like film projectors. Known as rear-projection TVs, the projector was housed contained in the TV cupboard and created a picture from behind the display. Additionally they used CRTs then, and in later iterations, an acronym-heavy array of different applied sciences (suppose DLP, LCD and LCoS). Quite a few rear-projection TVs outlined my first few years overlaying CES earlier than they have been changed by flat-panel expertise, typically skinny and light-weight sufficient to hold on a wall, a harbinger of the screens we use at this time for our Netflix marathon periods.
CES 2026: These 32 Tech Merchandise Made A few of the Greatest Impressions
Plasma expertise 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 expertise advanced in succeeding years however remained costly by at this time’s requirements — in 2005, Toshiba bought a 42-inch plasma for $4,500, for instance. Only a few 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 bunch of CNET journalists, together with myself. We met in CNET’s double-wide trailer within the convention middle parking zone and debated our option 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 similar time, and that expertise quickly outsold each plasma and different nonflat applied sciences. With the appearance of 4K decision, plasma expertise grew to become much less widespread and it left the market altogether by 2014. LCD has been the dominant TV expertise 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 through the years.
“To be sincere 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 affordable streaming
For so long as TVs have existed, they’ve seemingly delivered the identical fundamental idea: a display with video and sound that you just look ahead to leisure at dwelling. Different groundbreaking expertise concepts, nevertheless, have advanced 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 gadget that recorded TV exhibits onto cassette tapes. Initially a bit {of professional} broadcast gear, it hit the UK market in 1972, the place it bought for £600 — the equal of round $13,000 at this time. It had a built-in TV tuner to file tv applications broadcast over the air in addition to an analog clock that robotically initiated recordings.
“The VCR was essential on so many various ranges,” Shapiro tells me. “It modified the idea of TV. It empowered shoppers to decide on what they wish to watch and after they wish to watch it.”
The concept that you can “time shift” to observe a present at a later time was revolutionary, ultimately remodeling dwelling leisure ceaselessly. Till then, tv programming had set broadcast instances. To expertise “appointment TV,” you needed to comply with a present’s schedule for the time being 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 really referred to as “VCR,” nevertheless 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 12 months 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 pleasure in his assortment of recorded Disney motion pictures.
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 following few years, the 2 incompatible codecs and their gadgets — each now referred to as VCRs — battled it out available in the market, one-upping one another in advertising, model help and technological innovation, akin to recording lengths.
“There was a format battle happening 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 will 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 form, rewind.” However the expertise of dwelling 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 similar time, a disc-free gadget made its debut: the DVR. It proved far more widespread than DVD-R for recording TV exhibits and flicks.
TiVo and Replay TV have been among the many first DVRs, gadgets that saved a whole bunch of hours of TV exhibits and enabled automated recording to a tough disc. With a DVR, the “work” of programming recordings was a lot simpler. You may merely point out that you just wished to file each new episode of The Simpsons, and the DVR would do it robotically. 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 commercials and skip forward in 15- or 30-second increments. Some even included the flexibility to skip previous commercials robotically with out having to press a button in any respect. A kind 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 an alternate winner as a substitute.
“After 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 At this time, headlined “CBS orders crush CNET credibility.” The reversal sparked a controversy that CNET veterans like me bear in mind for example of company pursuits overstepping editorial integrity.
DVRs stay a staple in US households at this time, sometimes bought by cable TV firms. However as extra People ditch their cable subscriptions and exchange them with streaming companies, DVRs have moved to the cloud. The primary reside TV streaming service, Sling TV, debuted at CES 2015 with a $20 package deal that included channels akin to 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.
At this time, Sling and its rivals — YouTube TV, Hulu Plus Reside TV and extra — all provide cloud DVRs. They allow you to file TV exhibits robotically and watch them every time and wherever, and so they even allow you to fast-forward by commercials. However you will should press a button to take action.
Past TV exhibits and flicks, one other sort of leisure shares a wealthy historical past of CES debuts. It bought its begin on tv at dwelling however has moved quickly into moveable 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 business. 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 dwelling 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 of the earliest profitable online game. Originating as a stand-up arcade recreation, Pong then made its option to dwelling consoles, together with the Dwelling Pong, a TV-connected console that was launched at CES in 1974.
Highlights for n00bs: Trying again on 40 years of gaming
Atari workers 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 like the VCR, a house recreation console was a TV accent that opened up one other world with out requiring you to go away the home. Permitting customers to work together with the display and management the contents, in addition to compete towards one other participant, was groundbreaking.
Gaming has since advanced to embody quite a few different techniques and platforms, extending past the confines of TVs to incorporate computer systems, telephones, VR headsets and extra. It is in all places and extra widespread than ever, and CES has performed proper alongside.
“We have been essential to the sport business. 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 a giant 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 Area Invaders. Protected to say I used to be hooked on gaming, together with hundreds of thousands of different folks.
Atari continues to be round at this time and even launched the throwback Atari 2600 Plus a few years in the past, however different firms and gadgets have dominated gaming because the 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 some of the 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 moveable gaming right into a single gadget.
“CES at all times felt just a little off-timed for gaming in comparison with E3’s late-spring gaming reveals, nevertheless 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 exhibits 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 trendy recreation console additionally bought 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 gadget. 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 a giant “X” embossed on high 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 motion pictures. The Xbox was the primary console with a hard-disc drive, which presaged trendy gaming consoles. (Variations of the present PlayStation 5 and Xbox Sequence S lack disc drives altogether and depend on video games downloaded to the arduous disc.)
The Xbox was additionally massively profitable, partially due to the recognition of certainly one of its launch titles — Halo: Fight Advanced — nevertheless it by no means matched the recognition of its direct competitor, Sony’s PlayStation 2. The Xbox versus PlayStation rivalry continues to at the present time, 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 certainly one of my greatest profession failures, once we misplaced that phase,” Shapiro says once I ask about gaming. “We made some dangerous choices, and so they created E3, which has gone by a life cycle of its personal.”
Nonetheless, CES has remained an essential venue for gaming {hardware} debuts. PC makers, chipmakers like Nvidia and VR and AR firms, together with Oculus — now folded into Meta — nonetheless debut merchandise in Vegas. In the meantime, large gaming firms 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 12 months.
The transfer towards launching essential tech merchandise at separate, company-specific occasions has actually diminished the significance of CES through the years. No firm illustrates that pattern greater than Apple.
CES 1992: Apple drops Newton, a failed precursor to the iPhone
Very like its on-again, off-again relationship with gaming firms, CES is not actually a cellphone present at this time. That title belongs to the Cellular World Congress. But even the MWC performs second fiddle to the person cellphone launches placed on by large cellular firms: Samsung Unpacked, the Google Pixel occasion and, most significantly, the Apple iPhone occasion. That is the place potential cellphone consumers and tech journalists collect to get all the main points concerning the 12 months’s latest cellular 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 gadget 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 because the introduction of the Macintosh.
The Newton was extremely bold at the moment, and it is not 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 moveable gadget, dominated by a big display, 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 gadget may convert phrases written on the display with an included stylus into textual content. That function did not work nicely, typically 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 approach too costly, beginning at $700 when it hit the market in 1993, which might be greater than $1,500 at this time.
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 operating tiny cellular variations of Microsoft Home windows additionally appeared across the mid-Nineteen Nineties, however early smartphones — principally, PDAs with mobile expertise inbuilt — shortly overcame them. Probably the most buzzworthy merchandise of CES 2009 was the Palm Pre, a smartphone utilizing the corporate’s brand-new WebOS cellular software program. The Pre won CNET’s Best in Show and the Individuals’s Voice Award, cementing its place in CES historical past.
“Palm knew precisely what it was doing utilizing CES to launch a comeback cellphone with a daring new OS,” remembers Jessica Dolcourt, now CNET’s vice chairman of content material, who was, on the time, an editor overlaying cellular expertise. “It was an excellent play that mentioned the Pre wasn’t ‘simply’ a cellphone — it was as consequential and dazzling as any TV or gaming laptop computer.”
The Pre introduced one thing contemporary 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. One in every 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, fully 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 may 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 spite of everything these years overlaying the present, it is that flashy tech concepts can take longer than you would possibly count on to grow to be part of our on a regular basis lives, if they do at all. In every of the instances 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.”
They usually’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?
If you happen to ask the nearly 150,000 people who attended this 12 months, the reply is irrelevant. CES is right here, steeped in historical past, and it is certain to be full of futuristic, bold and peculiar new expertise. It is nearly actually going to be round subsequent 12 months, too.
So I say cross the inconceivable 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
Undertaking Supervisor | Danielle Ramirez
Editors | Corinne Reichert
Director of Content material | Jonathan Skillings
