I can not overlook the most important TV I’ve ever seen. Deep inside a conference heart 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 formidable residence 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 screens, good 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 without doubt one of the present’s most vital exhibitors of shopper electronics, and I knew that its big TV can be the speak of my business. 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. Aside from 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 strong 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. Powerful gig, I do know.
Large TVs stay one of the recognizable symbols of CES, they usually’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 essentially modified the viewing expertise.”
However there’s much more to CES than TVs. Through the years, the buyer electronics extravaganza has been the place we first obtained a glimpse of know-how that we use every single day — recreation consoles, cutting-edge telephones, even streaming companies — in addition to extra futuristic tech, together with humanoid robots, AI-powered laundry machines, and private electrical plane. CES is the place hundreds of corporations debut their splashiest improvements, and it is one of the vital predictors of the subsequent huge tech pattern.
And though 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 based mostly in Vegas, showcased the pc know-how of the day, competing immediately in opposition to CES. E3, a large online game business occasion spawned from CES, occurred yearly from 1995 to 2021. A handful of worldwide know-how commerce reveals, together with Cellular World Congress in Barcelona, IFA in Berlin and Computex in Taipei, are nonetheless going sturdy, however CES stays king.
We will 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 Client Know-how Affiliation, which hosts the large 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 Better of CES 2026 got here from our exhaustive evaluate of an array of laptops, robots, residence tech, wellness tech, TVs and way more.
The subsequent wave of family robotics, driverless vehicles, 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 is likely to be years earlier than they’re reasonably priced, accessible and helpful sufficient to grow to be a part of our lives.
The street from wild idea to family mainstay is lengthy and fraught with many lifeless ends, but it surely 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 title, the Client Electronics Present — occurred 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 Nineteen 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 know-how that mixes a number of digital elements right into a small “chip,” or microchip — the stuff that finally 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 residence to look at cartoons, regardless of our dad and mom’ warnings that sitting too shut would smash our eyesight.
Regardless 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, 12 months after 12 months, with greater decision, higher distinction, extra life like colour and brightness, chasing actuality in constancy and measurement.
A 2025 CNET survey discovered individuals do certainly crave big 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 individuals to purchase one measurement larger than you suppose you want,” Chris Hamdorf, government vp at TV maker TCL, instructed CNET in 2025. As a TV reviewer, I give individuals the identical recommendation, however there was a time when 65-inch TVs have been removed from frequent.
In the course of 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 (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 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 periods.
CES 2026: These 32 Tech Merchandise Made A number of the Largest Impressions
Plasma know-how arrived in 1995 with the world’s first massive (42-inch) plasma show by Fujitsu, and at CES 1997, Philips showcased the primary commercially out there model. The know-how advanced 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 Better 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 heart parking zone and debated our technique to the perfect total winner. I touted the excellent image high quality of earlier Panasonic plasmas I would reviewed, together with a promising new 3D video, full with glasses. Oops! Inside a couple of years, that idea was a strolling corpse, and I commented on its loss of life in 2017.
LCD-based shows have been evolving on the similar time, and that know-how quickly outsold each plasma and different nonflat applied sciences. With the appearance of 4K decision, plasma know-how grew to become much less widespread 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 massive because the 292-inch micro-LED TV that impressed me a lot. At CES 2024, I used to be significantly 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 shows. However innovation in TVs has definitely slowed down, as bigger TVs with glorious picture high quality have grow to be more and more reasonably priced 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 affordable streaming
For so long as TVs have existed, they’ve seemingly delivered the identical fundamental idea: a display screen with video and sound that you simply look ahead to leisure at residence. Different groundbreaking know-how concepts, nonetheless, 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 system 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 robotically initiated recordings.
“The VCR was vital on so many various ranges,” Shapiro tells me. “It modified the idea of TV. It empowered shoppers to decide on what they need to watch and once they need to watch it.”
The concept you may “time shift” to look at a present at a later time was revolutionary, finally remodeling residence leisure eternally. Till then, tv programming had set broadcast instances. To expertise “appointment TV,” you needed to comply with a present’s schedule in the intervening time it aired. With the power to file and archive video independently, individuals took extra possession of their leisure.
The format utilized by the N1500 was truly referred to as “VCR,” but it surely 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 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 and marketing, model assist and technological innovation, similar to recording lengths.
“There was a format struggle 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 could manufacture VHS VCRs. The format struggle 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 residence 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 through DVD-R discs. Across the similar time, a disc-free system made its debut: the DVR. It proved way more widespread than DVD-R for recording TV reveals and films.
TiVo and Replay TV have been among the many first DVRs, gadgets that saved a whole bunch 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 possibly can merely point out that you simply needed 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 via commercials and skip forward in 15- or 30-second increments. Some even included the power 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 within the awards course of and instructed CNET’s editorial workers to pick out another winner as an alternative.
“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 noticed 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 instance of company pursuits overstepping editorial integrity.
DVRs stay a staple in US households right now, usually bought by cable TV corporations. However as extra People ditch their cable subscriptions and substitute them with streaming companies, DVRs have moved to the cloud. The primary dwell TV streaming service, Sling TV, debuted at CES 2015 with a $20 package deal that included channels similar to ESPN, CNN, TNT and Disney Channel. I mentioned on the time that it stole the present and presaged a brand new period of slicing the cable TV twine.
At this time, Sling and its rivals — YouTube TV, Hulu Plus Stay TV and extra — all supply cloud DVRs. They allow you to file TV reveals robotically and watch them at any time when and wherever, they usually even allow you to fast-forward via commercials. However you may should press a button to take action.
Past TV reveals and films, one other sort of leisure shares a wealthy historical past of CES debuts. It obtained its begin on tv at residence 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 enduring 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 large information to contain the debut of the VHS format.
The 2600 is not the primary residence 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 technique to residence 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 workers included Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who quickly went on to discovered Apple. In 1974, they’d 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 Pc System), which was finally 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 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 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 crucial 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 an enormous hit, outselling its preliminary manufacturing run in 1977 and finally 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 hundreds of thousands of different individuals.
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 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 one 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 transportable gaming right into a single system.
“CES all the time felt slightly off-timed for gaming in comparison with E3’s late-spring gaming reveals, but it surely’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 trendy recreation console additionally obtained 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 deal with, Gates took the stage with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, then an expert wrestler, to hype up the system. Gates pulled apart a black fabric 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 high and a large 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 power to play CD-ROMs and DVD films. 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 laborious disc.)
The Xbox was additionally massively profitable, partly due to the recognition of certainly one of its launch titles — Halo: Fight Advanced — but it surely 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 undoubtedly certainly one of my greatest profession failures, after we misplaced that section,” Shapiro says after I ask about gaming. “We made some dangerous choices, they usually created E3, which has gone via 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, huge 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 Swap 2 earlier this 12 months.
The transfer towards launching vital tech merchandise at separate, company-specific occasions has definitely 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 like its on-again, off-again relationship with gaming corporations, CES is not actually a telephone present right now. That title belongs to the Cellular World Congress. But even the MWC performs second fiddle to the person telephone launches placed on by huge cellular 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 small print concerning the 12 months’s latest cellular gear.
In 1992, 15 years earlier than Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at Apple’s press occasion, the corporate attended its first CES. Apple’s CEO on the time was John Sculley, and the system 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 formidable at the moment, and it is not troublesome 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 system, dominated by a big display screen, and was designed to assist customers take notes, set up contacts, calendars and extra. It allowed individuals 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, nonetheless, the Newton was a market failure. Its chief function was handwriting recognition — the system may convert phrases written on the display screen with an included stylus into textual content. That function did not work properly, usually failing to precisely convert even easy phrases to textual content, and was famously skewered by the Doonesbury caricature. For a glorified notepad, the Newton itself was method 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 cellphone performance. Gadgets 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 know-how in-built — rapidly overcame them. One of the buzzworthy merchandise of CES 2009 was the Palm Pre, a smartphone utilizing the corporate’s brand-new WebOS cellular software program. The Pre received CNET’s Greatest in Present 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,” recollects Jessica Dolcourt, now CNET’s vp of content material, who was, on the time, an editor overlaying cellular know-how. “It was an excellent 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 contemporary and new to smartphones at a time of great distinction and variety, Dolcourt says. “I couldn’t wait to get my fingers 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 after we discovered that the iPhone was coming to Verizon. Apple made the large announcement in New York throughout CES, utterly upstaging the Vegas conference. In later years, Apple appeared at CES to focus on privateness 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 after 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 discovered from CES in any case these years overlaying the present, it is that flashy tech concepts can take longer than you would possibly anticipate to grow to be part of our on a regular basis lives, in the event that they do in any respect. 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.”
They usually’re not the one examples. I did not point out camcorders, CDs, Home windows Media Middle, Blu-ray versus HD-DVD, SACD versus DVD-Audio, 4G, smartwatches or Not possible 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 practically 150,000 individuals who attended this 12 months, the reply is inappropriate. CES is right here, steeped in historical past, and it is positive to be full of futuristic, formidable and bizarre new know-how. It is nearly definitely going to be round subsequent 12 months, too.
So I say go the unattainable lobster and level me to the flying robotic AI vehicles.
Visible Designer | Lily Yeh
Artwork Director | Jeffrey Hazelwood
Inventive Director | Viva Tung
Video Presenter | David Katzmeier
Video Editor | JD Christison
Mission Supervisor | Danielle Ramirez
Editors | Corinne Reichert
Director of Content material | Jonathan Skillings
