How AI indulgences kicked genuine tech highlights off centre stage
Image credit: Consumer Technology Association
CES 2026 doesn’t technically end until tomorrow, but then if it were a football match, it’d be the kind where the home side gets battered 4-0 and the cameras keep cutting to a stream of season ticket holders slumping towards the doors with 20 minutes left. An all-timer in the history of Consumer Electronics Show, it has not been.
You can probably guess why. If CES 2024 and CES 2025 were characterised by gaming hardware’s tightening embrace of artificial intelligence, 2026 seems to be the year it submitted to a f…
How AI indulgences kicked genuine tech highlights off centre stage
Image credit: Consumer Technology Association
CES 2026 doesn’t technically end until tomorrow, but then if it were a football match, it’d be the kind where the home side gets battered 4-0 and the cameras keep cutting to a stream of season ticket holders slumping towards the doors with 20 minutes left. An all-timer in the history of Consumer Electronics Show, it has not been.
You can probably guess why. If CES 2024 and CES 2025 were characterised by gaming hardware’s tightening embrace of artificial intelligence, 2026 seems to be the year it submitted to a full AI Brain takeover. Practical, sensible kit has been announced, but moreso than ever it has been consigned to footnotes, shunted aside so the spotlight can remain on dubiously useful (if not visibly rubbish) products and services that employ the shareholder community’s favourite acronym.
Nowhere was this more apparent than AMD’s keynote speech, a bizarre two-hour corporate carousel of guest star executives taking turns – like a Gorillaz album produced by Mark Zuckerberg – to run pretend interviews with CEO Dr. Lisa Su about all the cool and certainly not made-up things AI might be able to do in the future. Partway through, a reveal of some actual consumer-grade laptop CPUs broke out, the series name of ‘Ryzen AI 400’ evidently having formed a convincing enough disguise to let it slip in amongst all the Future of Technology backslapping.
Only for about three minutes, mind, or a fraction of the time that Dr. Su spent chatting with her mates. Mates like OpenAI CEO Greg Brockman, whose ChatGPT bot has been busy encouraging suicides, or Trump science adviser Michael Kratsios, who’s demonstrated his commitment to scientific understanding by slashing US research funding. "What are the biggest things we must do to get right, such that we lead in AI?", Dr. Su asks, met immediately by a classic libertarian dogwhistle about removing "regulatory roadblocks to innovation." Mate, did you see that Ark: Survival Evolved DLC trailer? I’m not sure regulation is the issue here.
CES, as a showcase, can count itself lucky that this keynote didn’t entirely set the tone for the rest of the proceedings. Because here’s the thing: there were actually quite a lot of compelling, desirable, or otherwise positive developments at this year’s event. They just had the oxygen sucked away from them by AI nonsense.
You may have seen me giving the kiss of life to some of these: Lenovo’s SteamOS version of the Legion Go 2 is probably my personal highlight by "Oh that’s neat" metrics, while Nvidia’s public release of DLSS 4.5 upscaling was a pleasant surprise. (That one does use machine learning, but in a limited and pretty much entirely non-problematic way that’s afforded it distance from the current GenAI-will-save-us zeitgeist.) After delays, Nvidia also launched G-Sync Pulsar, essentially a new form of monitor backlight strobing that works with adaptive sync systems to clean up blur and ghosting effects in fast-moving games – even on screens with adaptive refresh rates, which have never played nice with previous attempts at backlight strobing. We’ll see the first Pulsar-compatible monitors on shelves as soon as February.
Intel, meanwhile, unveiled their Panther Lake family of laptop CPUs. The Core Ultra 3 Series, as it’s more officially called, wouldn’t have normally been much cause for intrigue, but its advances on the integrated graphics side of things do sound quite tasty: their Arc B390 GPU is said to be 77% faster than the previous generation’s Arc 140V. Moreover, Intel confirmed that a Panther Lake chip specifically for handheld PCs is in the works. That’s big news, as one of the best-performing portables right now is the MSI Claw 8 AI+, which happens to be powered by... the Arc 140V. Promising stuff.
Dell, to their credit, knowingly resisted "AI PC" branding with their new Alienware systems and monitors, with head of product Kevin Terwilliger acknowledging that home PC owners are "not buying based on AI". Such heretical proclamations went unheard by other exhibitors long enough for Dell to also announce the revival of their XPS business laptop line, which, if you’ll forgive a brief detour from games hardware, is the computing equivalent of the 1660 Restoration unbanning Christmas. I still think the 2015 model of the XPS 13 is the nicest laptop I’ve ever used.
Image credit: Alienware
Other niche slivers of happiness could be found around CES 2026, like mechanical keyboard mainstays Cherry bouncing back from a recent factory closure with their first line of fast, deterioration-resistant magnetic key switch ’boards. And, of course, there was the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D, likely to become the CPU of choice for high-end PC builds when it launches later this year.
Not that you’d know it existed, had you solely sat through AMD’s lightly villainous keynote – two hours and this ostensibly flagship chip wasn’t mentioned once. Could a couple of minutes have not been shaved off the authoritarian bootlicking segment to make room for an actual product? Was it simply too much to ask the guy from Jeff Bezos’ rocket company to share runtime with something that the proles might be more interested in?
Apparently so, and plenty of other manufacturers couldn’t help themselves either. DLSS 4.5 and G-Sync Pulsar, two genuine attempts at technical problem-solving with sole focuses on making games better to play, had to cohabit an announcement with Dynamic MFG, yet another version of Nvidia’s lag-inducing AI frame generation tech. Not to mention, via Nvidia ACE, more experiments in the invariably stilted and awkward world of AI NPCs. The latest attempt: adding a personality-bereft ‘adviser’ to Total War: Pharaoh, who is functionally a VRAM-heavy search engine in a funny hat.
Intel also buried their potentially world-beating handheld APU under slides of buzzwords about AI compute power and whatever a "Hybrid Agentic Planner" is, and while Razer had a new, Bluetooth-enabled version of their brilliant Wolverine V3 controller, they may have leaned further into high-concept silliness than any other gaming peripheral maker at the show. Headline item number one: Project AVA, an AI "desk companion" wherein a holographic anime catgirl (or, chillingly, the visage of real-life League of Legends pro Faker) can be made to bark basic FPS tactics at you. Number two: Project Motoko, which could charitably be described as an Apple Vision Pro that looks like a pair of headphones. Its applications, shown thus far only in heavily edited mockup clips, include summarising the pages of a book you’re reading – conveniently saving you the trouble of reading a book – and somehow holding and accessing facial recognition data on strangers.
CES has always had an excessively ambitious, maybe even unhinged energy to it, with its floors full of flying cars and smart bathtubs. But that unintentional comedy quackery has, over the past few shows, been replaced by something darker. Something still based in fantasy overpromising, but no longer delivered with the earnest charm of hopeful inventors. Instead, AI is venerated with the religious fervour, by people who aren’t simply content with arguing that you need it – the world itself must change around it. Thus, we have a Consumer Electronics Show where consumer electronics take a backseat to the rich and powerful standing on a stage, agreeing with each other about how bad legal safeguards are. If, indeed, those electronics earn a mention at all.