CES `26: Robots, TVs & Those Flaming Fajitas!
Crazy times!
Imagine, if you’ve never done it before, walking through the largest convention center in the USA, Las Vegas’s 2.5 million square feet of booths, from the South hall to the North hall, from Central to the new West Hall. And that’s not all. The overflow goes to exhibits at nearby hotels, like the Mandalay Bay, Wynn and Venetian.
No human could do it all, and this one caught more than usual, about 60% of the area covered, at least at the convention center. When it looked too daunting to handle the distance, you hop a free Tesla shuttle, which rides in an underground tunnel to get you from say, the West Hall to the Central Hall.
Even without shuttles, I was clocking in at 25,000 daily steps, or ten miles worth of walking. I covered CES for Scripps News, where I’m their Tech and Travel Contributor. You can see two of my video reports here.
I saw lots of folks—150,000 of them, robots, beautiful TVs, new pinball machines with video and audio, several new Chinese drones, even though they’ve been banned by the Trump administration for sale, routers, car technology, a bird feeder that can take photos of the little ones and reveal to you what kind of bird this is.
I saw AI everything.
And what do I remember? Those TVs and the robot parade.
Let’s start with the TVs.
This was the year that AI was the big CES buzzword, and that seemed to have infected TV manufacturers as well. Give them a break. TV sale are flat even as prices keep falling, and what new stuff can they add to entice consumers to ditch the old set for the new?
How about AI information on the side of the screen? Instead of asking Alexa to reveal the name of the actor, use the Chatbot for a rolling conversation about George Clooney, his bio, where he lives, how many films he’s made, etc.
However, the manufacturers don’t see actors as the selling point, but instead sports, for info about the players, their stats and such. This to me is a yawn.
I’m there for the show, not for the rolling sidebar conversation.
I own an Amazon branded TV, and have been urged to use Alexa to turn it on and off, up the volume, tell me about the actors in the scene, and I never use any of it. Why bother?
Additionally, companies like Hisense, LG, Samsung and TCL are touting AI as a tool that can make your incredible looking TV image even better, by instantly brightening up and adding more color, and they showed before and after video to prove the point.
I’m all for better images, but I don’t want to start watching Fake TV. If I as a filmmaker want my shot to look a specific way, how does LG get away with altering that?
Screen Size
What did impress me, as it does every year, is just how beautiful and more colorful the new sets are. Each year, they seem to be getting bigger and bigger. I ogled a 136 inch set from Hisense at the show that just knocked me out, and inquired about the pricing. The booth staff played dumb, so I looked it up.
Only $100,000. ($50,000 off, screams the ad from Best Buy!)
I’ll have to wait on that one. Or get a bigger house.
When I got home, I measured the wall to see if it would even hypothetically fit. Not even close. Our wall doesn’t even top 100 feet.
So there goes that dream.
Sidenote: even as higher end TVs (micro-LED, with the richest colors) have gone way up, the bottom end has gone way down. The average selling price for a 50-inch 4K TV is now $300.
ROBOTS!
These humanoids were everywhere at CES. I saw robots boxing attendees (as above) competing with them at Ping-Pong and chess, dealing Blackjack, folding clothing, making and serving coffee and ice creams, dancing, and talking to me as if they were human.
My take: robots are way more prevalent than we think, being used now in factories and agriculture to do the menial work we don’t want to do. And we’ll see a lot more behind the scenes in the future—but not in the home.
They’re not cheap—to buy one of the humanoids I spoke with would set you back as much as a 136 inch Micro-LCD TV. The folks at the boxing/ping pong robots booth wouldn’t talk costs with me, except to say it would be on the “high end.”
The CEO of Realbotix told me he was targeting senior homes with his bots as companions to offset loneliness. And he was comfy admitting the $100,000 price tag. Great—but who’s going to buy?
The CES robot invasion was to wow people—and to maybe find a few paying enterprise customers with deep pockets.
In 2017 I visited a little hamburger restaurant in Pasadena that was experimenting with a robot named “Flippy” who could cook and flip burgers. The officials told me at the time that this job was one that was really tough to fill, because students could find better-paying, less taxing part-time employment by driving an air-conditioned car and delivering food.
Now eight years later Flippy can be found at White Castle and Jack in the Box. And on our recent trip to Japan, robots delivered food at restaurants. Here in LA, we have delivery robots rolling up and down Sunset Blvd. without getting run over.
The `bots are here!
CES No. 1 Highlight
That would be meeting up with old friends and colleagues all over Las Vegas and getting the opportunity to drag some of my favorite people to my most beloved restaurant in the world, Juan’s Flaming Fajitas and Cantina. Huge thank to Rich DeMuro, Luis and Isabella Cruz for joining me.
If you’ve never been there before, Juan’s is way off the Strip, in the part of Las Vegas where normal non-tourist folk live, and their specialty, beyond home made everything, even the tortillas, is—you guessed it—fajitas that are served flaming. There’s nothing better!
Boston & The Next Giveaway
It’s Semiquincentennial time!
The America 250 series that I shot last October (prime time in New England) kicks off Sunday on Scripps News at 10 a.m. ET with the Boston Photowalks episode, where the revolution began. I hope you’ll check out all the living history that’s still standing. The five part series takes us from Boston to Providence and Newport, RI, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, DC.
Best of all: we’ve got a great giveaway with Best Western Hotels that I’ll fill you in on tomorrow as well.
Thanks for taking the time to watch, read and listen!
Jeff
If you don’t know….
Jefferson Graham is the Los Angeles based host and producer of the PhotowalksTV travel series, which airs on Scripps News, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Peacock and other outlets, a longtime writer-photographer, former columnist for USA TODAY, author of the Photowalks newsletter, aspiring jazz guitarist and massive fajita freak.