PDAs, Tube TVs and $13,000 VCRs: How CES Bounce-Begins the Tech of Tomorrow

I am unable to overlook the largest TV I’ve ever seen. Deep inside a conference heart in Las Vegas, a Samsung PR consultant calmly ushered me previous staff organising for the night occasion. They had been getting ready for Samsung’s First Look, the annual unveiling of the corporate’s most bold residence leisure {hardware} for the approaching 12 months. Tons 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 midconstruction 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 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. Yearly, Samsung is without doubt one of the present’s most vital exhibitors of client electronics, and I knew that its large TV could be the discuss 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. Apart from 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 a whole lot of different journalists and my CNET colleagues, I write articles and shoot movies in regards to the coolest devices on the planet. Robust gig, I do know.

Large TVs stay one of the recognizable symbols of CES, they usually’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 essentially modified the viewing expertise.”

However there’s much more to CES than TVs. Over time, the patron electronics extravaganza has been the place we first acquired a glimpse of expertise that we use each day — recreation consoles, cutting-edge telephones, even streaming companies — in addition to extra futuristic tech, together with humanoid robots, AI-powered laundry machines, and private electrical plane. CES is the place hundreds of corporations debut their splashiest improvements, and it is one of the vital predictors of the subsequent huge tech development.

And regardless that 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 based mostly in Vegas, showcased the pc expertise of the day, competing immediately towards CES. E3, an enormous online game trade occasion spawned from CES, came about yearly from 1995 to 2021. A handful of worldwide expertise commerce reveals, together with Cellular World Congress in Barcelona, IFA in Berlin and Computex in Taipei, are nonetheless going sturdy, however CES stays king.

We are able to 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.  

CNET has an extended historical past at CES. Teaming up with the Shopper Know-how Affiliation, which hosts the huge present, we have bestowed the official Better of CES Award on a handful of choose merchandise. This 12 months, we did it once more, now along side our colleagues at PCMag, ZDNET, Mashable and different Ziff Davis publications. Our picks for the Better of CES 2026 got here from our exhaustive evaluate of an array of laptops, robots, residence tech, wellness tech, TVs and way more.

The following wave of family robotics, driverless automobiles, high-tech elder care and musical lollipops, together with different units, companies and applied sciences, nonetheless of their formative phases, was on show on the present. It may be years earlier than they’re inexpensive, accessible and helpful sufficient to turn into a part of our lives. 

The highway from wild idea to family mainstay is lengthy and fraught with many lifeless ends, however it 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 — came about 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 had been even bigger. 

The inaugural CES was a by-product of one other technology-focused commerce occasion, the Chicago Music Present, the place audio expertise confirmed up within the type of pocket radios. 

From the beginning, CES featured TVs. Invented lengthy earlier than the 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 had 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 into the heart 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 had been children, my sister and I sat a few toes from our tube TV at residence to observe cartoons, regardless of our mother and father’ warnings that sitting too shut would destroy our eyesight.

Regardless of the period, the best TV is all the time one thing larger, 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, 12 months after 12 months, with larger decision, higher distinction, extra reasonable colour and brightness, chasing actuality in constancy and measurement. 

A 2025 CNET survey discovered individuals do certainly crave large screens. Almost half of the respondents mentioned that if cash had been no object, they might need a TV larger than 65 inches of their properties. 

“Lots of people ask what measurement TV ought to I purchase, and I all the time inform individuals to purchase one measurement larger than you assume you want,” Chris Hamdorf, govt vice chairman at TV maker TCL, informed CNET in 2025. As a TV reviewer, I give individuals the identical recommendation, however there was a time when 65-inch TVs had been removed from frequent.

In the course of the ’80s and ’90s, larger-screen televisions hit the market utilizing a expertise just like film projectors. Referred to as rear-projection TVs, the projector was housed contained in the TV cupboard and created a picture from behind the display screen. Additionally they used CRTs then, 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 masking CES earlier than they had been changed 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 marathon periods.

Plasma expertise arrived in 1995 with the world’s first massive (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. Just some years later, plasma hit mainstream pricing and have become very recommendable. 

In 2010, the Better 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 heart car parking zone and debated our strategy to the perfect total winner. I touted the very good image high quality of earlier Panasonic plasmas I might reviewed, together with a promising new 3D video, full with glasses. Oops! Inside a couple of years, that idea was a strolling corpse, and I commented on its dying in 2017.

LCD-based shows had been evolving on the similar time, and that expertise quickly outsold each plasma and different nonflat applied sciences. With the appearance of 4K decision, plasma expertise turned much less common and it left the market altogether by 2014. LCD has been the dominant TV expertise ever since.

These days, CES is awash in huge screens, though none are fairly as massive 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. However innovation in TVs has actually slowed down, as bigger TVs with wonderful picture high quality have turn into more and more inexpensive over time. 

“To be trustworthy with you, the significance of TV at CES is certainly diminished,” CTA’s Shapiro says. “As a result of it’s such a tremendous client product that it is virtually cheaper than wallpaper now.”

CES 1970: A $13,000 VCR units the stage for affordable streaming

For so long as TVs have existed, they’ve seemingly delivered the identical fundamental idea: a display screen with video and sound that you just look ahead to leisure at residence. Different groundbreaking expertise 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 might be the primary machine that recorded TV reveals onto cassette tapes. Initially a bit {of professional} broadcast gear, it hit the UK market in 1972, the place it offered for £600 — the equal of round $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 mechanically initiated recordings.

“The VCR was vital on so many various ranges,” Shapiro tells me. “It modified the idea of TV. It empowered customers to decide on what they wish to watch and once they wish to watch it.”

The concept that you possibly can “time shift” to observe a present at a later time was revolutionary, ultimately remodeling residence leisure endlessly. Till then, tv programming had set broadcast occasions. To expertise “appointment TV,” you needed to observe a present’s schedule in the meanwhile it aired. With the flexibility to file and archive video independently, individuals took extra possession of their leisure. 

The format utilized by the N1500 was really known as “VCR,” however it 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 occasions (2 hours versus 1 hour). Over the subsequent few years, the 2 incompatible codecs and their units — each now known as VCRs — battled it out out there, one-upping one another in advertising, model assist and technological innovation, equivalent to recording lengths. 

“There was a format warfare occurring 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 could manufacture VHS VCRs. The format warfare was successfully over.

The VCR had a 40-year reign, characterised by Blockbuster video rental shops and their reminders to “be form, rewind.” However the expertise of residence 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 through DVD-R discs. Across the similar 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 had been among the many first DVRs, units that saved a whole lot 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 would merely point out that you just needed to file each new episode of The Simpsons, and the DVR would do it mechanically. There have been no discs to trouble with, so you did not have to fret about damaging them. 

DVRs additionally allowed you to fast-forward by commercials and skip forward in 15- or 30-second increments. Some even included the flexibility to skip previous commercials mechanically 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 strategy of suing Dish over its commercial-skipping capabilities. CBS intervened within the awards course of and instructed CNET’s editorial workers to pick out an alternate winner as an alternative. 

“After I heard that CNET gave an award and CBS reversed it, that should have been devastating to the workers,” 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 Immediately, headlined “CBS orders crush CNET credibility.” The reversal sparked a controversy that CNET veterans like me bear 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 Individuals ditch their cable subscriptions and substitute them with streaming companies, DVRs have moved to the cloud. The primary reside TV streaming service, Sling TV, debuted at CES 2015 with a $20 bundle that included channels equivalent 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.

Immediately, Sling and its rivals — YouTube TV, Hulu Plus Reside TV and extra — all provide cloud DVRs. They allow you to file TV reveals mechanically and watch them every time and wherever, they usually even allow you to fast-forward by commercials. However you will must press a button to take action.

Past TV reveals and films, one other type of leisure shares a wealthy historical past of CES debuts. It acquired its begin on tv at residence however has moved quickly into moveable 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 enduring 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 large information to contain the debut of the VHS format. 

The 2600 is not the primary residence 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-about the earliest profitable online game. Originating as a stand-up arcade recreation, Pong then made its strategy to residence consoles, together with the Residence Pong, a TV-connected console that was launched at CES in 1974. 

Atari staff 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 offered to Warner Communications in 1976 for $28 million to fund the event of a tool code-named VCS (Video Pc System), which was ultimately renamed the Atari 2600.

Video video games had been new on the time and playable on devoted arcade machines. Very 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. Permitting customers to work together with the display screen and management the contents, in addition to compete towards 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 all over the place and extra common than ever, and CES has performed proper alongside.

“We had been crucial to the sport trade. We had Nintendo and Sony and Sega,” Shapiro says, including, “I bear in mind the man from Atari was on our board.”

The 2600 was an enormous 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 Area Invaders. Protected to say I used to be hooked on gaming, together with tens of millions of different individuals.

Atari continues 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 units have dominated gaming because the early Nineteen 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 influential recreation units ever. It featured add-ons just like the Zapper gentle 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 moveable gaming right into a single machine.

“CES all the time felt slightly off-timed for gaming in comparison with E3’s late-spring gaming reveals, however it’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 best way again in 2013.”

One other trendy recreation console additionally acquired 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 known as the Xbox. 

In a memorably over-the-top CES keynote handle, 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 an enormous “X” embossed on high and an enormous 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 flexibility to play CD-ROMs and DVD films. The Xbox was the primary console with a hard-disc drive, which presaged trendy gaming consoles. (Variations of the present PlayStation 5 and Xbox Collection S lack disc drives altogether and depend on video games downloaded to the onerous disc.)

The Xbox was additionally massively profitable, partially due to the recognition of one among its launch titles — Halo: Fight Developed — however it by no means matched the recognition of its direct competitor, Sony’s PlayStation 2. The Xbox versus PlayStation rivalry continues to at the present time, 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 is positively one among my greatest profession failures, once we misplaced that phase,” Shapiro says once I ask about gaming. “We made some unhealthy choices, they usually created E3, which has gone by a life cycle of its personal.”

Nonetheless, CES has remained an vital 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, huge 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 Change 2 earlier this 12 months.

The transfer towards launching vital tech merchandise at separate, company-specific occasions has actually 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 like 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 Cellular World Congress. But even the MWC performs second fiddle to the person cellphone launches placed on by huge cellular corporations: Samsung Unpacked, the Google Pixel occasion and, most significantly, the Apple iPhone occasion. That is the place potential cellphone patrons and tech journalists collect to get all the small print in regards to 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 machine he unveiled was known 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 bold at the moment, and it isn’t troublesome to see a straight evolutionary line from the MessagePad to the iPhone. Apple known as it a PDA, for private digital assistant. The Newton was a handheld and moveable machine, dominated by a big display screen, and was designed to assist customers take notes, manage 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 electronic mail.” 

Finally, nevertheless, the Newton was a market failure. Its chief characteristic was handwriting recognition — the machine may convert phrases written on the display screen with an included stylus into textual content. That characteristic did not work properly, usually failing to precisely convert even easy phrases to textual content, and was famously skewered by the Doonesbury sketch. 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 mobile phone performance. Gadgets like BlackBerry and handhelds operating tiny cellular variations of Microsoft Home windows additionally appeared across the mid-Nineteen Nineties, however early smartphones — mainly, PDAs with mobile expertise inbuilt — rapidly overcame them. One of the crucial buzzworthy merchandise of CES 2009 was the Palm Pre, a smartphone utilizing the corporate’s brand-new WebOS cellular software program. The Pre gained CNET’s Finest in Present 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,” recollects Jessica Dolcourt, now CNET’s vice chairman of content material, who was, on the time, an editor masking 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 great distinction and variety, Dolcourt says. “I couldn’t wait to get my arms 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 among my most vivid CES recollections was in 2011 once we discovered 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 focus on privateness and to 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 by no means was. And once 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 masking the present, it is that flashy tech concepts can take longer than you may count on to turn 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 on their very own. It took years and intense competitors to determine a “winner.”

They usually’re not the one examples. I did not point out camcorders, CDs, Home windows Media Heart, Blu-ray versus HD-DVD, SACD versus DVD-Audio, 4G, smartwatches or Unimaginable Pork.

The 2026 version of CES is now within the books. 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? 

When you ask the practically 150,000 individuals who attended 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 expertise. It is virtually actually going to be round subsequent 12 months, too. 

So I say cross the unattainable lobster and level me to the flying robotic AI automobiles.

Visible Designer | Lily Yeh

Artwork Director | Jeffrey Hazelwood

Artistic Director | Viva Tung

Video Presenter | David Katzmeier

Video Editor | JD Christison

Mission Supervisor | Danielle Ramirez

Editors | Corinne Reichert

Director of Content material | Jonathan Skillings