CES 2026: the power supply is the product

The annual Las Vegas exercise in stapling language models to inventory has concluded. As always, the interesting signal is in the parts nobody put on a keynote slide.

the actual trend#

Every category at this show is now constrained by thermals and power delivery rather than by compute.

Laptops with neural accelerators that cannot sustain their rated throughput for more than a few minutes in a thin chassis. The TOPS number on the sticker is a peak, and the peak lasts as long as the thermal mass does.

Handhelds where battery life is the entire product decision and every added capability is a subtraction from it.

Home devices that want to run models locally and cannot, because the power envelope of something that sits on a shelf is a few watts.

Desktops where the power supply recommendations for a current-generation GPU have crept past what a lot of household circuits comfortably deliver alongside everything else in the room.

This is what a computing era looks like when it hits a physical wall. The interesting engineering for the next several years is efficiency, not capability — which is historically when the best engineering happens.

what to actually take from the show#

On-device inference is a spec sheet lie in the thin-and-light category. If you are shipping software that assumes a local NPU, test on a machine that has been running for twenty minutes, not on a cold one. The difference is large and nobody benchmarks it.

Unified memory keeps winning. Every serious local-AI machine announced has shared CPU/GPU memory at high capacity. Discrete VRAM is a bad fit for a workload where capacity matters more than peak bandwidth, and the industry has figured that out.

The robot demos are still teleoperated. They have been for four years. Watch for the operator's hands, or the suspiciously smooth trajectory, or the fact that the demo never deviates from the script. There is real progress in robotics and it is happening in warehouses, not on stages.

the accessory economy#

A large fraction of the floor was accessories for devices that do not exist yet: cases, docks, and mounts for AI wearables. That is a leading indicator of nothing except that the accessory industry moves fast and takes risks cheaply.

the one thing I would actually buy#

The mundane one: displays got better and cheaper. High-refresh, high-resolution, accurate-color monitors are at prices that were flagship prices three years ago.

If you have been running the same monitor since 2020 and you spend eight hours a day looking at text on it, that is the highest-value hardware purchase available to you, and it will not be mentioned in a single keynote.

the meta-observation#

CES has been a bad predictor of what matters for about a decade. The genuinely important hardware of the last ten years — the M1, the H100, TPUs, the shift to ARM in servers — was announced at industry events or in blog posts, to audiences who understood it, without a stage show.

The consumer electronics show is now mostly a trade event for retail buyers, covered as if it were a technology forecast. Read the specs. Skip the narrative.