I can not neglect the largest TV I’ve ever seen. Deep inside a conference middle in Las Vegas, a PR consultant for Samsung calmly ushered me previous staff establishing for the night occasion. They had been getting ready for Samsung’s First Look, the annual unveiling of the corporate’s most bold house leisure {hardware} for the approaching 12 months. Hundreds 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, sensible TV options and wacky shows constructed into modernist bookshelves. I brushed by the Sero, a TV that would 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. Every 12 months, Samsung is among the present’s most necessary exhibitors of shopper electronics, and I knew that its large TV can be the speak of my business. As it towered over me, I felt like I used to be a part of know-how historical past. I’ve been attending CES for many of my grownup life. With the exception of 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 tons of of different journalists and my CNET colleagues, I write articles and shoot movies concerning the coolest devices on the planet. Tough gig, I do know. Read extra: CNET Is Choosing the Best of CES 2026 AwardsCNET has a protracted historical past at CES. Teaming up with the Consumer Technology Association, which hosts the present, we have bestowed the official Best of CES Award on a handful of choose merchandise. We’re doing it once more in 2026, this time along side our colleagues at PCMag, ZDNET, Mashable and different Ziff Davis publications. The huge present is scheduled for the week of Jan. 5, and we have spent months planning find out how to sort out it. Huge TVs stay some of the recognizable symbols of CES, and so they’ve solely grown in significance for the reason that introduction of HDTV broadcasts in 1998. “HDTV was the biggest thing in my lifetime for video, no question about it,” says Gary Shapiro, president of the CTA. “HDTV fundamentally changed the viewing experience.” But there’s much more to CES than TVs. Over the years, the patron electronics extravaganza has been the place we first bought a glimpse of know-how that we use daily — recreation consoles, cutting-edge telephones, even streaming providers — in addition to extra futuristic tech, together with humanoid robots, AI-powered laundry machines, and private electrical plane. CES is the place 1000’s of firms debut their splashiest improvements, and it is some of the necessary predictors of the following huge tech development. And regardless that 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. Other 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 straight in opposition to CES. E3, an enormous online game business occasion spawned from CES, came about yearly from 1995 to 2021. A handful of worldwide know-how commerce reveals, together with Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, IFA in Berlin and Computex in Taipei, are nonetheless going robust, however CES stays king. We can see the affect of the present on TVs, VCRs, recreation consoles and PDAs. These 4 units, every with a wealthy historical past at CES, have a tech legacy that continues to push ahead. I anticipate to see a continuation of that evolution at CES 2026, together with different units, providers and applied sciences nonetheless of their formative levels. The subsequent wave of family robotics, autonomous mobility, AI-assisted well being care and salt spoons will exist in a sales space or show at this 12 months’s present. It may be years earlier than they’re inexpensive, accessible and helpful sufficient to change into a part of our lives. The highway from wild idea to family mainstay is lengthy and fraught with many lifeless ends, but it surely usually begins at CES. CES 1967: In the start, there have been TVs The very first CES — on the time, it glided by its full identify, the Consumer Electronics Show — came about in New York City in 1967. It attracted 117 exhibitors, which is tiny by at present’s requirements. By comparability, CES 2025 featured greater than 4,500 exhibitors and drew 142,465 attendees, and pre-COVID reveals had been even bigger. The inaugural CES was a derivative of one other technology-focused commerce occasion, the Chicago Music Show, the place audio know-how confirmed up within the type of pocket radios. Tube TV/Lily Yeh/CNETFrom the beginning, CES featured TVs. Invented lengthy earlier than the 1960s, that decade noticed the adoption of colour tv broadcasts within the US and the launch of TV satellites. At the 1967 CES, essentially the most cutting-edge TVs displayed had been these with built-in circuits, a know-how that mixes a number of digital parts right into a small “chip,” or microchip — the stuff that ultimately would change into the center of each laptop computer and smartphone. During 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. When we had been children, my sister and I sat a few ft from our tube TV at house to observe cartoons, regardless of our dad and mom’ warnings that sitting too shut would wreck our eyesight. No matter the period, the best TV is all the time one thing greater, one thing that guarantees to carry the immersive, magical really feel of a movie show into a house. During my profession, I’ve watched TVs broaden and enhance, 12 months after 12 months, with larger decision, higher distinction, extra lifelike colour and brightness, chasing actuality in constancy and measurement. A 2025 CNET survey discovered folks do certainly crave large screens. Nearly half of the respondents mentioned that if cash had been no object, they might need a TV greater than 65 inches of their properties. “A lot of people ask what size TV should I buy, and I always tell people to buy one size bigger than you think you need,” Chris Hamdorf, government vice chairman at TV maker TCL, advised CNET in 2025. As a TV reviewer, I give folks the identical recommendation, however there was a time when 65-inch TVs had been removed from frequent. During the ’80s and ’90s, larger-screen televisions hit the market utilizing a know-how just like film projectors. Called rear-projection TVs, the projector was housed contained in the TV cupboard and created a picture from behind the display screen. They additionally used CRTs then, and in later iterations, an acronym-heavy array of different applied sciences (suppose DLP, LCD and LCoS). Numerous rear-projection TVs outlined my first few years overlaying CES earlier than they had 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 at present for our Netflix marathon classes. Plasma know-how arrived in 1995 with the world’s first giant (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 at present’s requirements — in 2005, Toshiba bought a 42-inch plasma for $4,500, for instance. Just just 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 gaggle of CNET journalists, together with myself. We met in CNET’s double-wide trailer within the convention middle car parking zone and debated our option to the perfect total winner. I touted the very good image high quality of earlier Panasonic plasmas I’d reviewed, together with a promising new 3D video, full with glasses. Oops! Within just a few years, that idea was a strolling corpse, and I commented on its demise in 2017. LCD-based shows had been evolving on the identical time, and that know-how quickly outsold each plasma and different nonflat applied sciences. With the arrival of 4K decision, plasma know-how turned much less in style and ultimately left the market altogether by 2014. LCD has been the dominant TV know-how ever since. Nowadays, 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 unbelievable OLED multiscreen shows. But innovation in TVs has definitely slowed down, as bigger TVs with wonderful picture high quality have change into more and more inexpensive over time. “To be honest with you, the importance of TV at CES is definitely diminished,” CTA’s Shapiro says. “Because it is such an amazing consumer product that it’s almost cheaper than wallpaper now.” CES 1970: A $13,000 VCR units the stage for affordable streaming Google Images/Envato/Lily Yeh/CNETFor so long as TVs have existed, they’ve seemingly delivered the identical primary idea: a display screen with video and sound that you simply look ahead to leisure at house. Other groundbreaking know-how 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 can be the primary system that recorded TV reveals onto cassette tapes. Originally a bit {of professional} broadcast tools, it hit the UK market in 1972, the place it bought for £600 — the equal of round $13,000 at present. It had a built-in TV tuner to report tv applications broadcast over the air in addition to an analog clock that mechanically initiated recordings. “The VCR was important on so many different levels,” Shapiro tells me. “It changed the concept of TV. It empowered consumers to choose what they want to watch and when they want to watch it.” The concept that you could possibly “time shift” to observe a present at a later time was revolutionary, ultimately remodeling house leisure perpetually. Until then, tv programming had set broadcast instances. To expertise “appointment TV,” you needed to comply with a present’s schedule in the mean time it aired. With the power to report and archive video independently, folks 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 pleasure 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 following few years, the 2 incompatible codecs and their units — each now referred to as VCRs — battled it out out there, one-upping one another in advertising and marketing, model assist and technological innovation, comparable to recording lengths. “There was a format war going on 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 conflict was successfully over. The VCR had a 40-year reign, characterised by Blockbuster video rental shops and their reminders to “be kind, rewind.” But the know-how of house 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. Around the identical time, a disc-free system made its debut: the DVR. It proved far more in style than DVD-R for recording TV reveals and flicks. TiVo and Replay TV had been among the many first DVRs, units that saved tons of 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 may merely point out that you simply wished to report each new episode of The Simpsons, and the DVR would do it mechanically. There had been no discs to hassle with, so you did not have to fret about damaging them. DVRs additionally allowed you to fast-forward by means of commercials and skip forward in 15- or 30-second increments. Some even included the power to skip previous commercials mechanically with out having to press a button in any respect. One of these DVRs, the Dish Network Hopper, debuted at CES and was named the 2013 Best of CES winner by CNET. Until it wasn’t. The firm 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 employees to pick out another winner as a substitute. “When I heard that CNET gave an award and CBS reversed it, that must have been devastating to the staff,” Shapiro tells me. “Then I realized this is, like, a gift. This is gonna get more publicity than ever.” He wrote a column for USA Today, headlined “CBS orders crush CNET credibility.” The reversal sparked a controversy that CNET veterans like me keep in mind for example of company pursuits overstepping editorial integrity. DVRs stay a staple in US households at present, sometimes bought by cable TV firms. But as extra Americans ditch their cable subscriptions and substitute them with streaming providers, DVRs have moved to the cloud. The first reside TV streaming service, Sling TV, debuted at CES 2015 with a $20 package deal that included channels comparable to ESPN, CNN, TNT and Disney Channel. I mentioned on the time that it stole the present and presaged a brand new period of reducing the cable TV wire. Today, Sling and its rivals — YouTube TV, Hulu Plus Live TV and extra — all supply cloud DVRs. They allow you to report TV reveals mechanically and watch them each time and wherever, and so they even allow you to fast-forward by means of commercials. But you may must press a button to take action. Beyond TV reveals and flicks, one other type of leisure shares a wealthy historical past of CES debuts. It bought its begin on tv at house however has moved quickly into transportable codecs and even digital actuality. I’m 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 large information to contain the debut of the VHS format. The 2600 is not the primary house 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 extensively thought of the earliest profitable online game. Originating as a stand-up arcade recreation, Pong then made its option to house consoles, together with the Home Pong, a TV-connected console that was launched at CES in 1974.
Highlights for n00bs: Looking again on 40 years of gaming
See all images 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 Computer System), which was ultimately renamed the Atari 2600. Video video games had been new on the time and playable on devoted arcade machines. Much just 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. Allowing 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 methods and platforms, extending past the confines of TVs to incorporate computer systems, telephones, VR headsets and extra. It’s in all places and extra in style than ever, and CES has performed proper alongside. “We were very important to the game industry. We had Nintendo and Sony and Sega,” he says, including, “I remember the guy from Atari was on our board.” The 2600 was a giant hit, outselling its preliminary manufacturing run in 1977 and ultimately promoting 30 million items 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, Combat and Space Invaders. Safe to say I used to be hooked on gaming, together with tens of millions of different folks. Atari remains to be round at present and even launched the throwback Atari 2600 Plus a few years in the past, however different firms and units have dominated gaming for the reason that early 1980s. In 1985, Nintendo unveiled the NES, or Nintendo Entertainment 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 thought to be some of the influential recreation units ever. It featured add-ons just like the Zapper mild gun and launched Nintendo’s best-known franchises, together with Mario, Metroid and Zelda. Numerous TV-based and handheld successors adopted, culminating within the Nintendo Switch, the primary hit console to mix each at-home and transportable gaming right into a single system. “CES always felt a little off-timed for gaming compared to E3’s late-spring gaming reveals, but it’s still been a place where new gaming tech has pushed the envelope,” says CNET Editor at Large Scott Stein, who’s been attending CES reveals since 2004. “The Razer Edge gaming tablet gave a preview of where the Switch was later heading, all the way back in 2013.” Another trendy recreation console additionally bought its begin at CES. In 2001, Bill 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 tackle, 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 first time, let me unveil Xbox.” The putting black monolith with neon inexperienced highlights had a giant “X” embossed on prime and an enormous wired controller. Google Images/Envato/Lily Yeh/CNETMicrosoft 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. (Versions of the present PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series 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 considered one of its launch titles — Halo: Combat Evolved — but it surely by no means matched the recognition of its direct competitor, Sony’s PlayStation 2. The Xbox versus PlayStation rivalry continues to this present day, 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’s definitely one of my biggest career failures, when we lost that segment,” Shapiro says after I ask about gaming. “We made some bad decisions, and they created E3, which has gone through a life cycle of its own.” Nonetheless, CES has remained an necessary 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. Meanwhile, huge 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 necessary tech merchandise at separate, company-specific occasions has definitely diminished the significance of CES over time. No firm illustrates that development greater than Apple. CES 1992: Apple drops Newton, a failed precursor to the iPhone Much like its on-again, off-again relationship with gaming firms, CES is not actually a telephone present at present. That title belongs to the Mobile World Congress. Yet even the MWC performs second fiddle to the person telephone launches placed on by huge cellular firms: Samsung Unpacked, the Google Pixel occasion and, most significantly, the Apple iPhone occasion. That’s the place potential telephone 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 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 less than a revolution,” and it marked the pc firm’s first new product line for the reason that 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 transportable system, dominated by a big display screen, and was designed to assist customers take notes, set up contacts, calendars and extra. It allowed folks to learn ebooks greater than a decade earlier than Amazon launched the Kindle. A Newton commercial boasted: “Send faxes without paper and receive pager messages and email.” Ultimately, nevertheless, 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 cartoon. For a glorified notepad, the Newton itself was means too costly, beginning at $700 when it hit the market in 1993, which might be greater than $1,500 at present. Other PDAs on the time included the IBM Simon and the Nokia 9000, each of which featured early cellphone performance. Devices like BlackBerry and handhelds operating tiny cellular variations of Microsoft Windows additionally appeared across the mid-1990s, however early smartphones — mainly, PDAs with mobile know-how in-built — shortly overcame them. One of essentially 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 received CNET’s Best in Show and the People’s Voice Award, cementing its place in CES historical past. “Palm knew exactly what it was doing using CES to launch a comeback phone 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 know-how. “It was a brilliant play that said the Pre wasn’t ‘just’ a phone — it was as consequential and dazzling as any TV or gaming laptop.” The Pre introduced one thing recent and new to smartphones at a time of large distinction and variety, Dolcourt says. “I could not wait to get my hands 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 of my most vivid CES recollections was in 2011 once we realized that the iPhone was coming to Verizon. Apple made the huge announcement in New York throughout CES, fully upstaging the Vegas conference. In later years, Apple appeared at CES to debate privateness and introduce AirPlay to TVs, amongst different initiatives, however none of its CES bulletins may examine to the affect of the Newton. “John Sculley was a keynote speaker,” Shapiro says. “Steve Jobs never was. And when I asked him about it, he said, ‘Love to keynote. Just move it to San Francisco and call it Macworld.'” CES 2026: What’s subsequent for tech historical past? If there’s any lesson I’ve realized from CES in any case these years overlaying the present, it is that flashy tech concepts can take longer than you may anticipate to change into part of our on a regular basis lives, in the event that they do in any respect. In every of the instances above, the units that had been first launched didn’t instantly revolutionize the market or all by themselves. It took years and intense competitors to determine a “winner.” And they don’t seem to be 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 about to kick off in Vegas for the present’s 59th 12 months. 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 ask the 150,000 folks anticipated to attend this 12 months, the reply is irrelevant. CES is right here, steeped in historical past, and it is positive to be full of futuristic, bold and bizarre new know-how. It’s virtually definitely going to be round subsequent 12 months, too. So I say go the not possible lobster and level me to the flying robotic AI vehicles. Visual Designer | Lily YehArtwork Director | Jeffrey HazelwoodCreative Director | Viva TungVideo Presenter | David KatzmeierVideo Editor | JD ChristisonProject Manager | Danielle RamirezEditors | Corinne ReichertDirector of Content | Jonathan Skillings
© Copyright - TechSwitchCF