PDAs, Tube TVs and $13,000 VCRs: How CES Leap-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 employees establishing for the night occasion. They have been getting ready for Samsung’s First Look, the annual unveiling of the corporate’s most bold dwelling leisure {hardware} for the approaching 12 months. A whole lot 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 might 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 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 business. 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. Aside 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 stable week. There, alongside a whole lot of different journalists and my CNET colleagues, I write articles and shoot movies concerning the coolest devices on the planet. Robust gig, I do know.

Big TVs stay one of the crucial 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 received a glimpse of expertise that we use day by day — sport 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 hundreds of firms debut their splashiest improvements, and it is one of the crucial vital predictors of the subsequent huge tech development.

And although 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. 

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 instantly towards CES. E3, an enormous online game business occasion spawned from CES, happened yearly from 1995 to 2021. A handful of worldwide expertise commerce reveals, together with Cell World Congress in Barcelona, IFA in Berlin and Computex in Taipei, are nonetheless going robust, however CES stays king.

We will see the affect of the present on TVs, VCRs, sport 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 a protracted historical past at CES. Teaming up with the Shopper Expertise Affiliation, which hosts the large 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 together with our colleagues at PCMag, ZDNET, Mashable and different Ziff Davis publications. Our picks for the Better of CES 2026 got here from our exhaustive assessment of an array of laptops, robots, dwelling tech, wellness tech, TVs and way more.

The following wave of family robotics, driverless vehicles, high-tech elder care and musical lollipops, together with different units, providers and applied sciences, nonetheless of their formative levels, was on show on the present. It is likely to be years earlier than they’re reasonably priced, accessible and helpful sufficient to develop into a part of our lives. 

The street from wild idea to family mainstay is lengthy and fraught with many useless 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 title, the Shopper Electronics Present — happened in New York Metropolis in 1967. It attracted 117 exhibitors, which is tiny by as we speak’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 the beginning, 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 develop 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. Once we have been youngsters, my sister and I sat a few toes from our tube TV at dwelling to observe cartoons, regardless of our mother and father’ warnings that sitting too shut would damage our eyesight.

Regardless of the period, the perfect TV is at all times one thing greater, one thing that guarantees to carry the immersive, magical really feel of a movie show into a house. Throughout my profession, I’ve watched TVs increase and enhance, 12 months after 12 months, with greater decision, higher distinction, extra reasonable colour and brightness, chasing actuality in constancy and dimension. 

A 2025 CNET survey discovered folks 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 properties. 

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

Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, larger-screen televisions hit the market utilizing a expertise much 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. In addition they used CRTs then, and in later iterations, an acronym-heavy array of different applied sciences (suppose DLP, LCD and LCoS). Quite a few rear-projection TVs outlined my first few years overlaying CES earlier than they have been changed by flat-panel expertise, usually skinny and lightweight sufficient to hold on a wall, a harbinger of the screens we use as we speak 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 developed in succeeding years however remained costly by as we speak’s requirements — in 2005, Toshiba bought 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 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 parking zone and debated our strategy to the very best total 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 just a few years, that idea was a strolling corpse, and I commented on its loss of life in 2017.

LCD-based shows have been evolving on the identical time, and that expertise quickly outsold each plasma and different nonflat applied sciences. With the arrival of 4K decision, plasma expertise turned much less well-liked 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 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 shows. However innovation in TVs has definitely slowed down, as bigger TVs with wonderful picture high quality have develop into more and more reasonably priced over time. 

“To be sincere with you, the significance of TV at CES is unquestionably diminished,” CTA’s Shapiro says. “As a result of it’s such an incredible client 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 primary idea: a display with video and sound that you just look ahead to leisure at dwelling. Different groundbreaking expertise concepts, nonetheless, have developed considerably over a brief interval. 

In 1970, simply three years into the historical past of CES, Philips showcased the N1500 VCR. It could be the primary gadget that recorded TV reveals onto cassette tapes. Initially 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 as we speak. It had a built-in TV tuner to report tv packages broadcast over the air in addition to an analog clock that routinely initiated recordings.

“The VCR was vital 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 after they need to watch it.”

The concept you could possibly “time shift” to observe a present at a later time was revolutionary, ultimately reworking dwelling leisure without end. Till then, tv programming had set broadcast occasions. To expertise “appointment TV,” you needed to comply with a present’s schedule for the time being it aired. With the flexibility to report and archive video independently, folks took extra possession of their leisure. 

The format utilized by the N1500 was really 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 satisfaction 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 referred to as VCRs — battled it out available in the market, one-upping one another in advertising and marketing, model assist and technological innovation, reminiscent of recording lengths. 

“There was a format conflict 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 bought worldwide, with solely 13% being Betamax fashions. Sony additionally introduced that it could 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 variety, rewind.” However the expertise of dwelling 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 identical time, a disc-free gadget made its debut: the DVR. It proved way more well-liked than DVD-R for recording TV reveals and flicks.

TiVo and Replay TV have 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 may merely point out that you just wished to report 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 flexibility to skip previous commercials routinely with out having to press a button in any respect. A type 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 an alternate winner as an alternative. 

“After I heard that CNET gave an award and CBS reversed it, that will need to have been devastating to the workers,” Shapiro tells me. “Then I spotted that is, like, a present. That is gonna get extra publicity than ever.” He wrote a column for USA In the present day, headlined “CBS orders crush CNET credibility.” The reversal sparked a controversy that CNET veterans like me bear in mind for instance of company pursuits overstepping editorial integrity.

DVRs stay a staple in US households as we speak, sometimes bought by cable TV firms. However as extra Individuals ditch their cable subscriptions and change them with streaming providers, DVRs have moved to the cloud. The primary dwell TV streaming service, Sling TV, debuted at CES 2015 with a $20 package deal that included channels reminiscent of ESPN, CNN, TNT and Disney Channel. I mentioned on the time that it stole the present and presaged a brand new period of slicing the cable TV wire.

In the present day, Sling and its rivals — YouTube TV, Hulu Plus Stay TV and extra — all provide cloud DVRs. They allow you to report TV reveals routinely and watch them at any time when and wherever, and so they even allow you to fast-forward by means of commercials. However you may need to press a button to take action.

Past TV reveals and flicks, one other type of leisure shares a wealthy historical past of CES debuts. It received its begin on tv at dwelling 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 business. 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 dwelling 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 broadly thought of the earliest profitable online game. Originating as a stand-up arcade sport, Pong then made its strategy to dwelling consoles, together with the House 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, that they had teamed as much as develop one other seminal sport, Breakout. Atari was bought 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 have been new on the time and playable on devoted arcade machines. Very like the VCR, a house sport 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 and management the contents, in addition to compete towards one other participant, was groundbreaking. 

Gaming has since developed to embody quite a few different techniques 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 well-liked than ever, and CES has performed proper alongside.

“We have been essential to the sport business. 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 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 hundreds of thousands of different folks.

Atari remains to be round as we speak and even launched the throwback Atari 2600 Plus a few years in the past, however different firms 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 thought to be one of the crucial influential sport 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. Quite a few TV-based and handheld successors adopted, culminating within the Nintendo Swap, the primary hit console to mix each at-home and moveable gaming right into a single gadget.

“CES at all times felt somewhat 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 Swap was later heading, all the way in which again in 2013.”

One other trendy sport console additionally received 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 handle, Gates took the stage with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, then knowledgeable wrestler, to hype up the gadget. Gates pulled apart a black fabric 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 prime 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 Sequence S lack disc drives altogether and depend on video games downloaded to the arduous disc.)

The Xbox was additionally massively profitable, partly due to the recognition of one in every of 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 in every of my largest profession failures, once we misplaced that phase,” Shapiro says once I ask about gaming. “We made some dangerous choices, and so they created E3, which has gone by means of 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 firms, together with Oculus — now folded into Meta — nonetheless debut merchandise in Vegas. In the meantime, 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 Swap 2 earlier this 12 months.

The transfer towards launching vital 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 like its on-again, off-again relationship with gaming firms, CES is not actually a cellphone present as we speak. That title belongs to the Cell World Congress. But even the MWC performs second fiddle to the person cellphone launches placed on by huge cellular firms: 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 small print 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 gadget 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 bold 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 moveable gadget, dominated by a big display, and was designed to assist customers take notes, arrange contacts, calendars and extra. It allowed folks 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.” 

In the end, nonetheless, the Newton was a market failure. Its chief function was handwriting recognition — the gadget might convert phrases written on the display 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 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 as we speak. 

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 — mainly, PDAs with mobile expertise inbuilt — rapidly overcame them. One of the 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 Folks’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 vice chairman of content material, who was, on the time, an editor overlaying cellular expertise. “It was a superb 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 super 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 in all my most vivid CES reminiscences was in 2011 once we discovered that the iPhone was coming to Verizon. Apple made the large announcement in New York throughout CES, fully upstaging the Vegas conference. In later years, Apple appeared at CES to talk about privateness and to introduce AirPlay to TVs, amongst different initiatives, however none of its CES bulletins might examine to the impression 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 overlaying the present, it is that flashy tech concepts can take longer than you may anticipate to develop into part of our on a regular basis lives, in the event that they do in any respect. In every of the circumstances above, the units that have been first launched didn’t instantly revolutionize the market on their very own. 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, Home windows Media Middle, Blu-ray versus HD-DVD, SACD versus DVD-Audio, 4G, smartwatches or Inconceivable 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? 

If you happen to ask the practically 150,000 folks who attended this 12 months, the reply is irrelevant. CES is right here, steeped in historical past, and it is positive to be filled with futuristic, bold and bizarre new expertise. It is nearly definitely going to be round subsequent 12 months, too. 

So I say go the inconceivable lobster and level me to the flying robotic AI vehicles.

Visible Designer | Lily Yeh

Artwork Director | Jeffrey Hazelwood

Artistic Director | Viva Tung

Video Presenter | David Katzmeier

Video Editor | JD Christison

Undertaking Supervisor | Danielle Ramirez

Editors | Corinne Reichert

Director of Content material | Jonathan Skillings