I am going to always remember the largest TV I’ve ever seen. Deep inside a conference heart in Las Vegas, a PR consultant for Samsung calmly ushered me previous staff establishing for the night occasion. They have been getting ready for Samsung’s First Look, the annual unveiling of the corporate’s most formidable house leisure {hardware} for the approaching yr. Lots of of journalists and trade insiders would quickly have entry, however I used to be getting a behind-the-scenes preview.
We moved previous kiosks in mid-construction dedicated to PC displays, good TV options and wacky shows constructed into modernist bookshelves. I brushed by the Sero, a TV that would rotate its display 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 and a lot bigger than life.
That was at CES, the world’s largest tech event, in 2020. Yearly, Samsung is without doubt one of the present’s most necessary exhibitors of shopper electronics, and I knew that its large TV could be the speak of my trade. Because it towered over me, I felt like I used to be a part of expertise historical past.
I have been attending CES for many of my grownup life. Except for two years through 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 in regards to the coolest devices on the planet. Powerful gig, I do know.
Learn extra: CNET Is Choosing the Best of CES 2026 Awards
CNET has an extended historical past at CES. Teaming up with the Shopper Expertise Affiliation, which hosts the present, we have bestowed the official Better of CES Award on a handful of choose merchandise. We’re doing it once more in 2026, this time along with our colleagues at PC Journal, ZDNet, Mashable and different Ziff Davis publications. The large present is scheduled for the week of Jan. 5, and we have spent months planning sort out it.
Large TVs stay one of the vital recognizable symbols of CES, and so they’ve solely grown in significance because the introduction of HDTV broadcasts in 1998.
“HDTV was the largest factor in my lifetime for video, no query about it,” says Gary Shapiro, president of the CTA. “HDTV basically modified the viewing expertise.”
However there’s much more to CES than TVs. Over time, the buyer electronics extravaganza has been the place we first obtained a glimpse of expertise that we use day-after-day — sport consoles, cutting-edge telephones, even streaming companies — in addition to extra futuristic tech, together with humanoid robots, AI-powered laundry machines, and personal electric aircraft. CES is the place 1000’s of corporations debut their splashiest improvements, and it is one of the vital necessary predictors of the following large tech development.
And although 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 primarily based in Vegas, showcased the pc expertise of the day, competing directly against CES. E3, a large online game trade occasion spawned from CES, passed off yearly from 1995 to 2021. A handful of worldwide expertise 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 are able to see the affect of the present on TVs, VCRs, sport consoles and PDAs. These 4 gadgets, every with a wealthy historical past at CES, have a tech legacy that continues to push ahead. I count on to see a continuation of that evolution at CES 2026, together with different gadgets, companies and applied sciences nonetheless of their formative phases.
The following wave of family robotics, autonomous mobility, AI-assisted well being care and salt spoons will exist in a sales space or show at this yr’s present. It could be years earlier than they’re inexpensive, accessible and helpful sufficient to turn out 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 identify, the Shopper Electronics Present — passed off in New York Metropolis in 1967. It attracted 117 exhibitors, which is tiny by in the present day’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 expertise confirmed up within the type of pocket radios.
From its creation, 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 expertise that mixes a number of digital parts right into a small “chip,” or microchip — the stuff that ultimately would turn out 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. After we have been children, my sister and I sat a few ft from our tube TV at house watching cartoons, regardless of our mother and father’ warnings that sitting too shut would damage our eyesight.
Irrespective of the period, the perfect TV is at all times one thing greater, 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, yr after yr, with increased decision, higher distinction, extra lifelike colour and brightness, chasing actuality in constancy and dimension.
A 2025 CNET survey discovered individuals do certainly crave large screens. Practically half of the respondents mentioned that if cash have been no object, they’d need a TV greater than 65 inches of their houses.
“Lots of people ask what dimension TV ought to I purchase, and I at all times inform individuals to purchase one dimension greater than you assume you want,” Chris Hamdorf, government vp at TV maker TCL, instructed CNET in 2025. As a TV reviewer, I give individuals the same advice, however there was a time when 65-inch TVs have been removed from frequent.
Through the ’80s and ’90s, larger-screen televisions hit the market utilizing a expertise just like film projectors. Known as rear-projection TVs, the projector was housed contained in the TV cupboard and created a picture from behind the display. Then, in addition they used CRTs, and in later iterations, an acronym-heavy array of different applied sciences (assume DLP, LCD and LCoS). Quite a few rear-projection TVs outlined my first few years protecting CES, earlier than they were replaced by flat-panel expertise, usually skinny and light-weight sufficient to hold on a wall, a harbinger of the screens we use in the present day for our Netflix binge-watching.
Plasma expertise arrived in 1995 with the world’s first large (42-inch) plasma show by Fujitsu, and at CES 1997, Philips showcased the primary commercially obtainable model. The expertise advanced in succeeding years however remained costly by in the present day’s requirements — in 2005, Toshiba offered a 42-inch plasma for $4,500, for instance. Only 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, chosen by a bunch of CNET journalists, together with myself. We met in CNET’s double-wide trailer within the convention heart car parking zone and debated our technique to the perfect general 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 number of years, that idea was a strolling corpse, and I commented on its death in 2017
LCD-based shows have been evolving on the identical time, and that expertise quickly outsold each plasma and different non-flat applied sciences. With the appearance of 4K decision, plasma expertise grew to become much less common and eventually left the market altogether by 2014. LCD has been the dominant TV expertise ever since.
These days, CES is awash in large 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 significantly 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 displays. However innovation in TVs has definitely slowed down, as bigger TVs with glorious picture high quality have become increasingly affordable 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 a tremendous shopper product that it is nearly cheaper than wallpaper now.”
CES 1970: A $13,000 VCR units the stage for reasonable streaming
For so long as TVs have existed, they’ve seemingly delivered the identical fundamental idea: a display with transferring video and sound that you simply look ahead to leisure at house. Different groundbreaking expertise concepts, nevertheless, have advanced considerably over a brief time period.
In 1970, simply three years into the historical past of CES, Philips showcased the N1500 VCR. It could be the primary machine that recorded TV reveals onto cassette tapes. Initially a chunk {of professional} broadcast gear, it hit the UK market in 1972, the place it offered for £600 — the equal of $13,000 in the present day. It had a built-in TV tuner to file tv packages broadcast over the air, in addition to an analog clock that routinely initiated recordings.
“The VCR was necessary on so many alternative 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 can “time shift” to observe a present at a later time was revolutionary, ultimately reworking house leisure perpetually. Till then, tv programming had set broadcast occasions. To expertise “appointment TV,” you needed to observe a present’s schedule in the mean 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 yr 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 Disney motion pictures recorded off-air.
VHS launched at CES in 1977. It used a bigger cassette tape than Beta and promised longer recording occasions (2 hours versus 1 hour). Over the following 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 help and technological innovation, equivalent 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 offered worldwide, with solely 13% being Betamax fashions. Sony additionally introduced that it might 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 variety, rewind.” However the expertise 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. Across the identical time, a disc-free machine made its debut: the DVR. It proved way more common 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 automated 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 file each new episode of The Simpsons, and the DVR would do it routinely. There have 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 routinely, 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 in the awards process and instructed CNET’s editorial employees to pick out another winner as a substitute.
“After I heard that CNET gave an award and CBS reversed it, that will need to have been devastating to the employees,” 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 As we speak 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 in the present day, usually offered 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 stay TV streaming service, Sling TV, debuted at CES 2015 with a $20 package deal that included channels equivalent to ESPN, CNN, TNT and Disney Channel. I mentioned on the time that it stole the show and presaged a brand new period of cutting the cable TV cord.
As we speak, Sling and its rivals — YouTube TV, Hulu Plus Stay TV and extra — all provide cloud DVRs. They allow you to file TV reveals routinely and watch them at any time when and wherever, and even allow you to fast-forward by means of commercials. However you will need to press a button to take action.
Past TV reveals and films, one other form of leisure shares a wealthy historical past of CES debuts. It obtained its begin on tv at house, 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 long-lasting Atari 2600 console launched the house online game trade. The announcement of the console was a little bit of a shock. Attendees on the present anticipated the massive 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 sport, Pong, is extensively thought-about the earliest profitable online game. Originating as a stand-up arcade sport, Pong then made its technique to house consoles, together with the Residence Pong, a TV-connected console that was launched at CES in 1974.
Highlights for n00bs: Trying 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 sport, Breakout. Atari was offered to Warner Communications in 1976 for $28 million to fund the event of a tool code-named VCS (Video Laptop System), which was ultimately renamed the Atari 2600.
Video video games have been new on the time and playable on devoted arcade machines. Very similar to the VCR, a house sport console was a TV accent that opened up one other world with out requiring you to go away the home. Permitting customers to work together with the display 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 is in all places and extra common than ever, and CES has performed proper alongside.
“We have been essential to the sport trade. We had Nintendo and Sony and Sega,” he says, including, “I keep in mind the man from Atari was on our board.”
The 2600 was a giant hit, outselling its preliminary manufacturing run in 1977 and ultimately 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. Secure to say I used to be hooked on gaming, together with tens of millions of different individuals.
Atari remains to be round in the present day 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 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 vital influential sport gadgets ever. It featured add-ons just like the Zapper mild 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 Change, the primary hit console to mix each at-home and transportable gaming right into a single machine.
“CES at all times felt a little bit 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 Massive Scott Stein, who’s been attending CES reveals since 2004. “The Razer Edge gaming pill gave a preview of the place the Change was later heading, all the way in which again in 2013.”
One other fashionable sport 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 address, Gates took the stage with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, then an expert wrestler, to hype up the machine. Gates pulled apart a black material with the phrases: “For the primary time, let me unveil Xbox.” The placing black monolith, with neon inexperienced highlights, had a giant “X” embossed on high and a large wired controller.
Microsoft aimed to compete with Sony’s profitable PlayStation console and added related options to the Xbox, together with a broadband connection and the power to play CD-ROMs and DVD motion pictures. The Xbox was the primary console with a hard-disc drive, which presaged the trendy variations of gaming consoles. (Each the present PlayStation 5 and Xbox Collection S lack exterior disc drives altogether and depend on video games performed from the laborious disc.)
The Xbox was additionally massively profitable, partially due to the recognition of one among its launch titles — Halo: Fight Developed — but it surely by no means matched the recognition of its direct competitor, Sony’s PlayStation 2. The Xbox versus PlayStation rivalry continues to today, with Microsoft and Sony buying and selling unique titles, shopping for sport 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 sport builders and different {hardware} makers.
“That is positively one among my largest profession failures, after we misplaced that phase,” Shapiro says after I ask about gaming. “We made some unhealthy choices, and so they created E3, which has gone by means of a life cycle of its personal.”
Nonetheless, CES has remained an necessary 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, large 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 Switch 2 earlier this yr.
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
Very similar to its on-again, off-again relationship with gaming corporations, CES is not actually a cellphone present in the present day. That title belongs to the Cell World Congress. But even the MWC performs second fiddle to the person cellphone launches placed on by large cellular corporations: Samsung Unpacked, the Google Pixel occasion and, most significantly, the Apple iPhone occasion. That is the place potential cellphone consumers and tech journalists collect to get all the main points in regards to the yr’s latest cellular gear.
In 1992, 15 years earlier than Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at Apple’s press event, the corporate attended its first CES. Apple’s CEO on the time was John Sculley, and the machine 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 isn’t 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 machine, dominated by a big display, and was designed to assist customers take notes, arrange 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.”
Finally, nevertheless, the Newton was a market failure. Its chief characteristic was handwriting recognition — the machine may convert phrases written on the display with an included stylus into textual content. That characteristic did not work nicely, usually failing to precisely convert even easy phrases to textual content, and was famously skewered by the Doonesbury comic strip. For a glorified notepad, the Newton itself was manner too costly, beginning at $700 when it hit the market in 1993, which might be greater than $1,500 in the present day.
Different PDAs on the time included the IBM Simon and the Nokia 9000, each of which featured early cellphone performance. Units like BlackBerry and handhelds operating tiny cellular variations of Microsoft Home windows additionally appeared across the mid-Nineties, however early smartphones — principally, PDAs with mobile expertise in-built — rapidly overcame them. One of the vital buzzworthy merchandise of CES 2009 was the Palm Pre, a smartphone utilizing the corporate’s brand-new WebOS cellular software program. The Pre won CNET’s Best in Show and the Individuals’s Voice Award, cementing its place in CES historical past.
“Palm knew precisely what it was doing utilizing CES to launch a comeback cellphone with a daring new OS,” remembers Jessica Dolcourt, now CNET’s vp of content material, who was, on the time, an editor protecting cellular expertise. “It was an excellent play that mentioned the Pre wasn’t ‘simply’ a cellphone — 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 large 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. Considered one of my most vivid CES recollections was in 2011, after we discovered that the iPhone was coming to Verizon. Apple made the massive announcement in New York throughout CES, fully upstaging the Vegas conference. In later years, Apple appeared at CES to discuss privacy and introduce AirPlay to TVs, amongst different initiatives, however none of its CES bulletins may examine to the influence 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 spite of everything these years protecting the present, it is that flashy tech concepts can take longer than you may count on to turn out to be part of our on a regular basis lives, if they do at all. In every of the circumstances above, the gadgets that have been first launched didn’t instantly revolutionize the market, or all by themselves. It took years and intense competitors to determine a “winner.”
And so they’re not 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 yr. 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?
For those who ask the 150,000 individuals anticipated to attend this yr, the reply is irrelevant. CES is right here, steeped in historical past, and it is certain to be filled with futuristic, formidable and peculiar new expertise. It is nearly definitely going to be round subsequent yr, too.
So I say cross the unimaginable lobster and level me to the flying robotic AI automobiles.
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
