CES 2026 doesn’t officially start until Jan. 6, but if you’re a regular Gizmodo reader, you already know that it has unofficially started. Like every year, companies start dripping out teasers and partial product announcements at the end of December, weeks before the biggest tech show even opens its doors in Las Vegas. Be sure to follow our CES 2026 live blog to see all the stuff our consumer tech team will be taking a look at in person.
I have a strong feeling CES 2026 will be a lot more packed than everyone is anticipating. Six years after the pandemic, it seems to me—based on early announcements—that the show is finally roaring back to life. Revitalized by the promise of AI—whether automation, generative, agentic, or some other kind—companies are daring to shoot for the moon again. So what major trends are we expecting from the year’s biggest show for technology innovation? I may ultimately be wrong, but let me peer into my crystal ball and see if I can connect some dots.
AI will be inescapable
More than any CES show in past years, we’ll see AI shoved into every gadget imaginable. Samsung, LG, Lenovo, Razer—all of the biggest attendees and even the small unknown startups will be boasting about why some form of AI will supposedly make their products better. Some of the AI applications could legitimately move the needle; the vast majority will be AI features for AI features’ sake, overpromising and underdelivering.
As reporters, we’re gonna spend our days at CES 2026 wading through the AI minefield of intelligence sprinkled into laptops, mobile devices, home appliances, transportation, and more. The same way Wi-Fi was added to virtually every gadget, AI will wiggle its way in even if you don’t want it.
Do you really need AI in a washing machine or refrigerator? How many times is a big electronics company going to try to convince us at a packed press conference that we need some new home appliance to figure out how to cook a meal from leftover ingredients? The most useful AI functions will be the ones that don’t even appear to be AI, LLMs, or chatbots working invisibly in the background to make our lives more convenient.
A sea of smart glasses
If reviewing a bunch of smart glasses, including Meta’s Ray-Ban Display, last year signaled anything for what to expect in 2026, it’s that there will be an avalanche of smart glasses coming.
As a possible Next Big Thing after smartphones, every company seems to be trying to figure out how to commercialize smart glasses. How do you balance style and utility while making it worth the pricey early adopter cost and also squeeze in AI into them to keep up with the latest trend? Meta might have you thinking it’s figured out some magic recipe, but in reality it hasn’t. A single pair of smart glasses with solid screens, cameras, battery life, speakers, AI, and apps is still the holy grail device everyone is chasing.
Currently, smart glasses still have too many tradeoffs. It’s also not clear that consumers even want smart glasses that do it all. That’s why we’ve seen so many flavors of smart glasses—ones with mono and dual-lens waveguide screens, ones with no cameras (for privacy, naturally) at all, or simple “AI glasses” that excel best at taking photos and videos and playing music like a pair of open-ear headphones. Then, there are video glasses from the likes of Xreal that are bolting on XR functions to allow them to offer more computing-like features that you’d find in bulkier XR or VR headsets.
I don’t expect any smart glasses blueprint to emerge by the end of CES 2026, only that the variety of designs and offerings will widen beyond what we’ve already seen shipped. There will be far more smart glasses than XR and VR headsets. The metaverse is dead; AI is now the new hotness.
TV tech matters again
Okay, maybe consumers won’t care at all what micro RGB or WOLED means, but TV makers will be pushing hard to make their latest display technologies seem like must-haves when they eventually ship in actual flat screens.
Never mind that you may not understand how backlighting technologies work or that your worsening eyesight can’t see the wider dynamic range, expanded HDR, higher contrast, or increased brightness. CES 2026 will tout TV tech like it has for more than 50 years. The show simply wouldn’t be the same if you didn’t fly in to ogle pixels.
I’ll be paying close attention to how much AI is forced into new TVs and how companies choose to integrate AI in there. Google’s Gemini will no doubt replace the old Google Assistant, but I really want to see how much AI slop there will be. My guess is that there will be an uncomfortable amount of AI slop masquerading as utility. More AI screensavers—sorry, canvas art. More AI to create fake frames to make watching sports and gaming smoother, but visibly uglier when watching movies and TV shows because of the motion smoothening.
Speaking of higher frame rates, I have to wonder how high TV makers will go with the refresh rates? 120Hz, 165Hz, and 240Hz already push the envelope for gaming, but don’t be surprised if there are a bunch of TVs with even higher native (and artificially boosted) refresh rates just to outgun the competition on a spec sheet battle.
EVs and mobility take over
Everyone knows that CES is not a car show, but it’s also impossible to ignore the entire hall of EVs, automotive, and mobility tech at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Like a slow burn, there will be more of all of it. More EVs with absurd top speeds, longer ranges, and displays plastered inside their interiors; more e-bikes and e-scooters that blur the line with motorcycles; and more wacky prototype flying cars and personal quadcopters that will promise to hit the skies (but probably never will).
Zooming in more specifically, my observation is that there will be a trend of returning back to physical and tactile in-car controls. A decade ago, Tesla made touchscreen dashboards and controls ubiquitous, but carmakers and consumers are now realizing that good ol’ buttons never needed to be—and perhaps never should have been—ditched.
Personally, I welcome this return to sensibility. Besides giving cars more differentiation and character, physical buttons, dials, and knobs are actually more user-friendly while driving. Who could have imagined that turning a dial to adjust volume or the air conditioner is faster than tapping several layers into a touchscreen layer?
And of course, like every other connected device at CES 2026, I’m sure we’ll see AI crammed into the dashboard as well as more promises for self-driving tech.
Here come the home droids
It’s not that the smart home won’t have a huge presence at the show—it will—but it’s currently being retrofitted with AI, so it won’t sound groundbreaking. Google Assistant is being replaced by Gemini and Alexa with Alexa+. These “upgrades” are mostly on the backend, but as we’ve seen testing the early batch of products powered by these more intelligent voice assistants, the intelligence part is not quite there yet. When you need consumers to use two separate modes—one for smart home controls and another for more conversational AI—as you do with Gemini, it’s a sobering reminder that the retrofitting is still very much a work in progress.
What should be a lot more interesting on the smart home front is seeing intelligence merge with robotics within the home. I’m, of course, talking about humanoid robots that can lift things and do chores, and even beefed-up robot vacuums that can climb stairs. At CES 2026, we should be able to get a closer look at some of these personal robots. They won’t be commercially available at any affordable pricing anytime soon, but at the very least they should give us an idea of whether we’re really closer to the sci-fi dream of having a real-life C-3PO to do our bidding.
More of the usual consumer tech
Those are the bigger trends I expect to see at CES 2026. On a pure hardware level, the show will be filled with the usual new laptops and PCs, home entertainment systems (TVs and speakers), wearables, audio (wireless headphones and wireless earbuds), cameras, transportation (EVs, e-bikes, e-scooters), and mobile accessories and computer peripherals. A heaven of gadgets, if you will.
By the end of the show, the Gizmodo consumer tech team will be exhausted and hungry, but we’ll have taken in the whole spectacle of it all. CES is the best place to preview the future. Or rather, ideas of what the future looks like.
Source: gizmodo.com
