CES 2026; Everything is Robots!

CES 2026. I just got back from CES and I'm going to split my experience into four chapters. Chapter one, robots are everywhere. I've been going to CES for 3 years now, and there's always been robots. But this year, if you had been transported to 2026 from the past or from the future, a guy could be convinced that this was the year the robot takeover really started. In some cases, they were literally just walking in the general crowd among us. I saw robots picking up boxes, putting stuff in the boxes. Robots that were sorting parts. Robots pretending to repair some damage that was painted onto a wall. They're grabbing stuff, and they're moving stuff. So many robots grabbing stuff. Actually, we were all taking pictures of robots, but this robot was taking pictures of us. It's no longer just figure 1 and Boston Dynamics in the humanoid robots race. LG was showing off a Rosie from the Jetson style kitchen robot that can communicate with all your other LG appliances. So, like it knew what was in the fridge and it could even set the oven for cooking stuff. High sense, the what I thought was just a super cheap TV brand on Amazon. Well, they have a robot. Why not? Everyone does. You would think that home robots are just about to be everywhere. I saw a shoulder-mounted robot dinosaur. Not quite sure what the specific use case for this is. It's pretty cool, though. There were automated delivery robots, bigger automated delivery robots. And you know what comes with automated driving things? Liar. We're one year closer to that micro vision investment paying off. You'll see. This thing was like a security sentinel robot that drives around with infrared cameras to catch people hiding in the bushes or take your temperature. Maybe it also had cameras and lidars to map autonomously. And actually, lidar was pretty much everywhere, too. Lidar, LAR, LAR, LAR. There were flying robots mounted to the top of a jeep that could be deployed at a moment's notice. There were dozens of chess playing robots humiliating humans all day long. And you could have given me a lot of guesses and I would not have come up with marionette controlling robot. That's for sure. Robots moving pallets of cinder blocks around. Robots whose movement had been hijacked by people. There were robot lawnmowers. This one had a little grabby arm mounted to the top of it to, I don't know, move the shovel I just toss on the ground out of the way while it's doing its work. There were other robot lawnmowers that can climb steep hills and go over curbs. That same lawnmower grabby arm company also had a vacuum cleaner with a grabby arm on it, too. They must have had one really eager grabby arm engineer who was super good at talking his way into R&D meetings. It's the year of the grabby arm over here. There were vacuums that can climb stairs, too. About time that's a thing. There were robots moving garbage cans around. This one was drawing caricatures of people. Its goal was clearly to remind me that I didn't shave the whole time I was away from home. Really caught my beard stubble there. It's kind of funny. This thing was in a booth to catch your eye and sort of lure you in to look at their car battery system. It's like an AI battery management system for cars. So, the booth had nothing to do with this drawing robot. But the drawing robot had like 95% of people's attention. Then there was this robot dressed like Michael Jackson fighting with a man while a whole crowd of other robots waved on. And then he did a weird little dance. This was a creepy robot hand just bolted to a desk showing off its robot finger articulation. More dancing robots. They're actually quite a few dancing robots. Then there was this whole section of like cute robots. I guess they're mostly like companion chatty hang out with your kids kind of thing. These ones buzzed around in a little buggy. They could also come out of a little buggy. They're folding t-shirts. They're folding towels. They're playing the piano. They're serving you drinks. Actually, this was a theme throughout the show. I was really impressed by this one coffee serving robot, but then I saw this other coffee serving robot, and then I was really impressed by that coffee robot. He was even doing the little cup swirl. This one was very slowly doing dishes while needing to be bolted to the counter. Conceptually, I'm into it. I mean, I guess speed doesn't really matter if it's got all day to do the dishes. In Fallout, they have a robot above their sink. Again, they're dancing. And I will say that already they're moving a lot more fluidly than they were last year. Like real quick, dancy movements. And I feel like if a robot can do good dance moves, it can definitely just walk around my house pushing a Dyson vacuum or turning off lights and straightening the pillows on the couch after I leave. You wear some of the robots to help you hike or jump or go up a set of stairs. I'm actually connecting with this brand, HyperShell. I'm going to see if I can get them to send me one of these. Maybe my dad can actually keep up with me at Disney World. Hi, Dad. There are robots you can go inside of to relax. They don't just massage you. They'll actually stretch for you. Wall-ally, here we come. The demo for this booth had possibly the longest line in the entire show. Being able to grab a single card out of a deck of cards is, I'll bet, a pretty difficult engineering problem to solve when you're making a robot. This thing's way slower than a person card dealer, though. There were a few little tiny robots that weren't nearly as nimble as the dancers. Some very friendly Johnny number five vibes here. Although, lest we forget Johnny's original job title. I saw robot butlers, ones that were making cups of ice cream for the attendees and a set of industrial robots that can clean bathrooms with interchangeable little tools for their arms. The robots are coming. It's really only a matter of time now. They've all got some sort of LLM built in so you can talk to them naturally. I do think this will be a thing like smartphones where there was this before time that we all remember back to and then an after time where we think back to when we used to live like cavemen before house spots and how would we ever have managed to do everything and have time for hobbies. Chapter 2. Everything is electric. There were tons of fancy new electric propulsion devices being shown off at CES this year. Industrial Motors Car Motors Bugatti sells scooters apparently. They seem fine. You could always just go for the Bugatti Barbie car instead. Then there were the electric motorcycles. Electric motorcycle. Electric motorcycle. So many electric motorcycles. Segue. The scooter brand makes an electric motorcycle. Everyone seems to love using this rear wheel design with the exposed stator. And I do too. Also, there were some scooters that might as well be motorcycles. 75 mph with a 100 mile range with this thing from Na'vi. Are you kidding me? Too scary. They did have a pretty sweet e motorcycle though. I saw possibly the coolest retro futuristic scooter designs ever at Compass Rose. Retro was another pretty big theme this year at CES, and I'm into it as a guy who grew up in the 1980s and '90s. There were multiple electric passenger helicopter brands. I'm not sure what this little robot arm on wheels was up to here, but I was surprised to see probably about six different companies with what they said are working prototypes for passenger drones. Basically, the jet bike personal helicopter. Is it still a helicopter when it's got 48 rotors? this electric fire rescue I don't know tank. This is the Striker Voltera. I think it's designed for airports. This thing was huge. And not to be outdone by the robots, this electric charger company called Autel has a robot arm that can plug in your electric car for you. Now that's a convenience worth the $10,000 it must cost to have. I made that up. It might be $2,000. It might be $50,000. I didn't ask. There were lots of companies showing off their electric car chargers. AI. Electricity delivery is a big part of the electric future. Also, I think these very large cube- shaped batteries are a big part of the electric future. So, we can still charge EVs when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing. There were electric lawnmowers that map your yard, really big industrial electric lawnmowers. Kubota, the company that, as far as I knew, made diesel off-road side by sides, and I recognize that I'm simply not wellversed in the world of compact tractor manufacturers. They were here with something that I am sure that no one else is wellversed in either, which to me looks like our first giant leap forward towards the opening scene of Terminator 1. This fully autonomous, really big batterypowered bulldozer. They weren't even the only autonomous batterypowered bulldozer at the show. Bobcat showing up with their own robot skid steer driverless thing AI. There are whole electric car companies that I didn't even know existed, but they're like fully fleshed out and for sale. This is the Zeer 9X SUV. And in case you were wondering, yes, it's got AI in it. Or Tensor, Earth's first personal robo car. These guys could really use a smaller LAR module on top. Am I right? Someone set up a meeting with Mr. Davos. Adjacent to Everything Electric is Chapter 2B. Everything is autonomous. Autonomous delivery. Autonomous coffee makers. I believe this was an autonomous death delivering machine in the same booth as this autonomous stuff carrier. Airless wheels though, that's fancy. There were quite a few companies talking about these autonomous passenger van things. Not a car, but a robo taxi. I actually think I've been in a zuks before. I think they had these at the model home neighborhood Sarah and I went to before we built our house. No more driver, but more comfort. This one had like little office cubicles set up in it so you could work on your way to work. Love working. This one gets an honorable mention cuz it's not autonomous, but I do like when they try to design things for like the year 2050. Did you know farm tractors this size drive themselves? They actually have for a pretty long time now. This might have been the only combustion engine in the whole building. Amazon was there in the car section and their booth was basically standing room only. So, I didn't spend much time in there, but they're talking about autonomous driving for some reason. I think they have like an AI co-pilot thing. Chapter 3. Batteries. Batteries were a big presence at CES 2026. I mean, obviously, since everything's electric, you're not going to have your dancing cooking best friend home robot pulling a cord behind it as it walks around your house. There were giant industrial vehicle batteries. Little Mac Studio-sized camping batteries, batteries that connect your house to your solar panels. I actually talked to EcoFlow's influencer marketing girl about sponsoring the channel. I'm getting solar this spring to off-grid the studio. And I already knew about Ankor Sollex, Jackaryi, and EcoFlow. But there's also Bluei getting into home batteries, a company called Runhood, all powers. And they all seem to make everything from like a 3 kW battery hub that can charge your laptop 30 times to these huge stacks of expandable like up to 120 kwatt hours house backups. I really like the idea of just being able to plop another home battery module onto your home backup to expand it rather than paying many thousands of dollars to like install another Tesla power wall. They also all make EV chargers and smart breaker panels. I will definitely be experimenting with all of this stuff this year. Jackary even had this very clever home battery that can literally undock itself from the house, drive out of your garage and into your yard where it will then expand some solar panels to fold out and charge itself up. I saw some dissected batteries, a giant RV that runs on batteries, very spacious, like a New York apartment. They said they're going after a 200 mile range and can charge at home, but he wouldn't tell me how long it takes to fill up at home. I mean, I would think you have to just plug that thing in, wait a week to go 200 miles. Then there was this company and I think Matt Frell from Undecided with Matt Ferrell was talking about this type of technology. But I spent a few minutes talking to Mr. Sanchez from Leighton about this new process using sulfur to make batteries that can compete with lifepo batteries but are close to half the weight. And this kind of leap in progress is not just in the lab, but in his very own words, >> "Our lithium sulfur batteries are real. They're available and they are for sale now. >> They should really get teamed up with all of those flying car brands. Extend the range." I made this bet like 5 years ago with my friend Andy that if anything is ever going to usurp the smartphone, it'll be a pair of glasses that does smartphone stuff. They're still improving. The screens are getting better. Boy, is it hard to capture what it really looks like by using a big camera though. But they're still just a little bulky. They just got a little more work to do. We need some kind of battery breakthrough to get these things small enough for mass adoption. But for stuff like watching movies on a plane, these XRE glasses really do make it look like you're looking at like a 100in TV through them. But the only ones that really worked really well were these ones that still looked really silly on your head cuz they have to have a big computer and a big screen. And finally, chapter 4, computers. A new computer component that's been part of a spec now for a few iterations when laptops are trying to sell their AI processing power are these NPUs, neural processing units. There was a bit of a presence of companies showing off these standalone NPU processing boxes and cards. These speed up AI specific tasks like background removal, facial recognition, large language models. For me, an actual real world usage of these types of processing is the magnetic mask tool that I use to cut myself out of the background in my videos. So, with an Apple M4 Max, for instance, running Final Cut Pro, Apple's NPU runs at 40 tops. That's the speed rating. And some of these mobile lint processors top out, see what I did there, at 320 tops. So like eight times faster than a MacBook. This is called edge processing. Most of the AI things that we see on our laptops and phones so far call out to a cloud. All of the processing happens in some server somewhere and then they send the result back over the internet. But these new chips and these cards are going to make it possible to do that AI processing locally either on your computer or in a little box next to your computer to speed everything up. This one is set up to categorize the objects it sees. Handbag, phone. This one is estimating my skeleton for some reason. Gigabyte was there, but almost everything they wanted to talk about was AI, too. Same with AMD. Scalable AI pods, AI reasoning, edge solutions for physical AI. AI at your desk. Team up with AI. Gigabyte did have a 5090 laptop at their counter. That was pretty sweet. I was a big fan of this CPU cooler screen. It was like an inverted cube with screens all over it. And actually, every CPU GPU cooler in the building seemed to have a screen on it now. Screen. Screen. Cooler screen. It's the year of the CPU cooler screens. And I know this isn't new. I'm just not really a PC builder guy, so I haven't seen a lot of it. Going to CES is completely overwhelming. I was only on the floor for two and a half days, and I walked over 20 miles. Trying to see the whole show is hard. I really should go there with like a specific aim next year, so I can just make a video about a thing. They did have Duncan at the food court, so had that going for me. My award for plainest booth goes to Red Hat. And anything that brings us closer to the Ready Player One timeline, I'm on board with this thing. Looks like a ton of work, but more burnt calories means more guilt-free snack cakes, so take my money. Doof reality. I might just buy one of these. 4,000 bucks. There were actually quite a few companies there with these Game Simulator Force feedback chairs. And this I don't know what it's simulating chair. And I visited the Stern booth, Steve. That's about all I have to say about that. Is this guy famous? And man, that last video about SSDs, I used this new lens that has some kind of problem with it and didn't realize it. I just looked at the footage to see that it's full of chromatic aberration and it's just slightly out of focus. So, I'm really sorry about that. See, [snorts] that was not good.

This video is a retelling of my trip to CES 2026 this year. Split into four chapters: Everything is Robots, Everything is Electric, Batteries Are Everywhere and... Computers. With honorable mentions for games and smart glasses and Dunkin Donuts. I dont have any sponsors for this video but I really want 100,000 subscribers so if nothing else, join the fun, I only go to CES once a year, but I will be receiving tech products from a bunch of the companies there all year long to test out and try out. So thats something to look forward to.