The Vergecast - Live from CES: What is the point of a robot that falls over?

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

The theme of CES 2026 is gadgets. It's always gadgets. This year more than most, though, the world's biggest tech show is about how fast the hardware world is moving — and how much work the software, and the AI, have to do to catch up. On stage live at the Brooklyn Bowl in Las Vegas, David and Nilay talk through some of the biggest news of the week, from robots to laptops to AI cuddle buddies, to see what's really going to matter in tech this year. Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. I'm from the Brooklyn Bowl at the Consumer Electronics Show in Sin City, Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the Vergecast, presented by L'OGRU.

Please welcome to the stage, your Verge editor-in-chief, Nilai Patel, and editor-at-large. David Piers. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of things about the height of your ankle that run around on every surface at your house. I'm a friend David Pierce. Nealep Sal is here. Dogs?

Is cats? Who's to say? Have you seen the AI video of the cat doing the cripplock dance? Oh, what? It's all over my feeds. It might be the most important story at CES. Do you realize that almost every episode of this show at some point you ask me if I've seen an AI video of something now? That's what I do here.

Anyway, we're here at C. at the Brooklyn Bowl doing this live. Thank you to everybody who's here. Very good. This is the greatest day of my life. That's it. That's the first cast. I'm done.

I have nothing left. So we did a show, you and I, on Monday afternoon. Yeah. It came out on Tuesday, going through a bunch of the sort of early announcements of the show. And since then, we've both come to Vegas.

We've both gotten to be out on the show floor. We've taken some meetings. We've done some stuff. I first want to know this is your what 15 plus CES? 16 or 17? I want to say it's a long time Do you feel like you're good at it now? I have a lot of feelings about Las Vegas

Sure See this is a weird one this is a weird show I don't know if you had caught the same vibe Like Samsung doesn't have a booth They have a private booth in the Venetian All of the stuff on the show floor is sadder than it was before in like very meaningful ways. And then we're going to talk about just the enormous amount of components you can buy on the show for.

Like just acres of lenses and actuators as far as the eye can see. And it's very much the consumer electronics of this show are not happening at this show. They're happening in meeting booths and hotel rooms and all that sort of stuff. It's just a very different vibe than it's ever been. I remain convinced Las Vegas is the only city in the world where you can just walk out of a building and say, I would like to be in the largest limo you can find me. And someone will be like, yeah, I can do that for you. And that is truly, I think, America's major contribution to the world.

Like, it is the most transactional place you can be to the point where you can just demand the largest vehicle that exists at any given time in a radius. And it will be provided to you. So people ask me all the time. You know, you get the question. People are like, oh, you've been to see a bunch of time. What are your tips? And I used to give the normal tips, like, you know, bring chapstick, drink a lot of water. Give yourself a lot of time.

But now I've started giving people a tip that I just completely stole from you. which is take all the money that you would spend gambling and spend it on limos. And it is the best possible. Everyone will remember that you bought the limo for the rest of your life. You will not remember that you lost $500 playing roulette. And I think this puts me out of time because the entire economy is gambling now. And I'm not good at gambling. Like you can't be like the economy is Hummer limos.

Like that doesn't work. But yeah, I highly recommend taking your gambling budget for the night and be like, I'm going to buy the stupidest car I can get. It's still my number one biggest tip. And I, having now done this so many times, I'm at the point. point where I'm like old and it's it's like dangerously passe. They're like I just like I just do limos now and like I'm trying to find my inner child to become excited about again. We'll do that with all of you later tonight. We're going to take limos tonight. It's great. It's great. You heard it here

first. Yeah. So okay, so what we did was we put together a bunch of kind of bigger picture trends from CES. Like the sort of meaningful things that we're thinking about that are going to matter for the rest of the year that I think I think the way I've come to CES is less as like a bunch of individual and more sort of a statement of intent from the tech industry that's like, here's what we care about and what we think is going on. So we're going to pull a bunch of trends out and just kind of talk through what we've been seeing. Okay.

Does that make sense? Yeah. Okay. You have seen some of these, but not all of them. So you can veto me on any of them that you want, even though you'll be wrong, and that's fine. And the first trend that I've noticed, which is kind of what you just pointed at is, it seems like anybody can make anything now.

And so there is this really weird push at CES for everybody to make. everything. The thing I keep noticing is these companies, particularly that started in smart home or are in China or both. Companies like Switchbot, which is like a thing people know as a vacuum company showed up. And they have a humanoid home robot, which is like the thing to have at CES this year. If you didn't come with a robot that doesn't do anything but sort of walks around and looks funny, like what are you even doing? They have a bunch of other home products. they have a desk lamp that's like pixel art. And to me it's just like there is this very real ability to get almost anything.

And that to me is all over CES now. That is like everything is being manufactured at scale in China. And it is easier than ever to get access to all of those things. And so what we're seeing more than ever is just a thousand different versions of the same thing immediately as soon as it is invented. And it's like all the same thing. Yeah. And like unique and interesting.

ways that like the Boston Dynamics robot dog is like everyone has one now. Yeah. It took Boston Dynamics a long time to build that dog. And now everyone's like, I can also do that. And that is spread throughout the Chinese manufacturing economy. That to me, there's a lot of ways to feel about that. The number one thing that occurred to me as I walked the show for yesterday was all of this hardware is ready and none of this software is ready. Right.

If you can build a robot that can fall over, you're just waiting for someone to be like, I figured it out, I figured out how to make the AI, make the robot useful. And then when that happens, by some miracle, you'll have a useless robot in your house.

You'll flip the switch. You'll start paying the subscription fee. Right. And the robot will do your laundry. I don't know if you guys went to the LG booth where they were demo in Croyd. I watched the poor presenter at the LG booth, just the light go out of his eyes.

Just the 50th time he was like, and now it's going to fold this towel. And this was the big demo, right? And it wasn't clothes. It was towels. It was, I'm going to make this rectangle a smaller rectangle with the power of AI. And it just sat there, just baffled.

You know, just like, should I? And the guy's like, moving on, now that that towel's folded. It's like, the towel's not folded, man. It's less of a rectangle than it was before. And you can just see the software isn't ready. But the hardware is so ready, so beyond ready. And the software to make the human art robots balance and walk and do kung fu. Alison Johnson shared a video where one walked outside and did kung fu and it knocked itself out,

which is incredible. Which is a perfect metaphor for the whole thing. That is the best thing I've ever seen. You can just see the software to do the basics, stand up, walk around, move, do a dance. All that's ready. It's been ready for years because of Boston Dynamics and other companies. The software to turn the corner and make them useful at human. task is absolutely not ready. So that's like the first thing that just became really obvious.

The hardware ecosystem is ready. Which is actually very cool, right? Like this thing where it's, you can essentially make anything you want out of these incredibly immature supply chains for everything is very cool. It does make really obvious that most of it doesn't work yet the way that it's supposed to. But like, you know, we've said for years, the hardware is hard is like a truism of the tech industry. And and getting from, you know, I made one thing. in my garage to tens of them and then hundreds of them and then thousands of them I think is easier than ever.

Like it's still, it's still work and it's still a process but there's just so much out there to do now and so much to work with that is really exciting. This is very exciting and this is the other thing that just occurred to me, particularly as I'm wandering West Hall, which is where a lot of the mobility stuff is,

all the car tech is there. Obviously I was drawn to it like a mall through flame. And then in the back corner there's dozens of booth that are mostly like electric dirt bikes and the humanoid robots that aren't getting any coverage because those companies, it's like the same company. They're like, we do batteries and motors. This one can do jumps and that one can do falling over.

And like one of these is going to work out. And you're like, oh, the manufacturing capacity of China is out of control. Like, we don't have this. We can't just, you can't be three guys to start a company literally called AGIBOTS.com and then set up a booth at CSM. Is there a real thing? AGIBox.com. And it's like only one half of that name is correct.

You know? But like they just started it and they're here and they're not, you know, funded by some huge mega corporation. Everything in tech in America is like only Apple and Google have the scale to do this. And everything, you go through CES. You're like, these are very small companies that have access to massive manufacturing ability. Just letting them try stuff at a rate that we cannot conceive of.

And companies that size not a long time ago were relegated to like making apps, right? And the idea was like, the phone is the hardware, and now we have to figure out how to exist inside of it, or you make an accessory or something. And that has totally pulled out into the rest of the world. You can make anything now. But, you know, obviously we live in America that is beset by tariffs and trade wars. And it's like, well, any of that stuff actually come here? Like, what is the point of this? What is the point of a robot that falls over? And I think we will come to that throughout this conversation. But thank you for giving me the title of the episode, by the way. I don't know what we're actually demonstrating to people,

except that we have this incredible hardware capability that is waiting for the software to make it good, and it is unclear if the software is on the path to be good enough to run these robots the way that the video suggests they are, and the towel folding demos absolutely demonstrate they're not ready to do. Yeah, no, I agree. And that actually, that's a good segue to my second trend, which is that there are no good AI gadgets, but that has not stopped at everyone from trying. Like, everywhere you look here, there's one category of things that is like, we took a thing and we did AI to it.

And I mostly just like throw that away, right? Like, here's a hairbrush with AI. And it's like, well, that's nothing. So we're going to leave that alone. But this category of sort of dedicated AI gadgets is everywhere. And you get the sense even talking to the people who are making these things, that they're not at all sure what this is for and what it's supposed to do. So, like, let me just give you a bunch of examples. Lots of companies, including Lenovo, are doing smart glasses, right? And,

like you always say about the meta-ray bands, the fundamental disconnect is everybody wants them because they're a camera and their headphones and meta makes them because they're an AI product, right? Like, that disconnect is real. Lenovo is doing the same thing. Lots of other companies are here with AI glasses. Again, no one is sure what you're supposed to use them for, but everybody is convinced that that is a form factor. We also got a thing that is like a little desk bot that you mount your phone to, and it just launches an AI app that has eyes that's adorable, and it's a little companion. There's tons of AI companions here.

Everyone really learned that lesson from OpenAI. Yeah, right? They're like, this technology is making people crazy murderers. We should ship that. But what if it was adorable? Yeah. But yeah, so there's like little pets and lots of like fuzzy things, and all of these things meant to sort of bring AI into the world. Razor, you were just up here talking to the Razor CEO, but they made this little, this little thing that sits on your desk, that's an AI waifu. It's weird. It's a very weird conversation.

Razor also has an AI wearable that's a big pair of headphones with cameras and microphones. There's just lots of this stuff around. And I have not run into anyone who is like, here's why this thing needs to exist and isn't your phone. Like everybody is so sure. There's a lot of, no, there's a lot of people who will make the claims, but they're like infomercial. style claims. They're like, have you ever woken up and been like so lonely that you haven't had anyone to talk to? So you're like, I'm going to talk to this robot that might bang you.

And you're like, yeah, it's happened a handful of times. That just doesn't. So A, that is, that's the use case. Like, do we can just say it? Like, that is the use case. But I think, I mean, you're right. And there is something, again, it's with all of this stuff.

Like, this is why there's so many robots here, right? Because you look at this robot that doesn't work and it's really easy to imagine how cool it might be when it does. and this is, I think, the sort of dangerous spot we're in with AI in general is like so many of the futures are so genuinely exciting. That's like if and when all of this works the way that you're saying, it's going to kick ass. It's just that none of it does.

And there's not a lot of evidence that it's about to anytime soon. The robots are very interesting for a lot of reasons. But the main one is that they are awaiting a technology that isn't even being invested in at like the rate it needs to be to make the robots work. So all of our AI right now is built on LLMs. We've talked about this on the show a lot. Like LLMs have all the investment. They have all the hype.

Open AI is existentially tied to LLMs in a lot of ways. Mark Zuckerberg build superintelligence labs at META to bet on LLMs. He hired a new person. He pushed out Jan Lacoon. Jan Lekun, one of the fathers of AI, is like, LLMs can't do it. Like they're not going to get there. We need to build these world models.

And that's how you're going to get to robots. and super intelligence and all this other stuff that needs to happen next to LLNs. That video that we've all seen of Joanna Stern where the robot is following her but it's teleoperated by another guy, that's how you train the world models. And even that Razor,

those headphones, Min, the CEO of Razor, was telling me that they have interest from the robotics companies so that the teleoperators can wear the headsets while they run the robots because that will see everything that they're... Right, this is like a lot of work that needs to get done.

But no one's investing in the world. No one's out here talking about world models to enable these kinds of robots yet. Right? We're all still doing LMs. We're all still doing this very basic training. We have to collect all this data. And I just see all that.

And then I see the promises people are making and there's a pretty big gap. And I think the gap is smaller for the, we'll give you a little companion that you can just chat with. Because everyone has seen how much people like chatting with the chatbots. Yeah.

So if you can make a hardware chat bot, like maybe a lot of people will buy it. I think people are still going to just talk to the one on their phone. And I think this is like a real, you say this all the time. It's really hard to beat your phone. Like your phone is a pretty amazing device that's with you all the time. Are you going to take one of these AI companions with you? I just like don't know the answer. But I do know the big leap into robotics into all these other kinds of devices that can do things in the real world.

Require, and the AI industry is saying it itself, where they require a different kind of technology that is not being invested in at the rate that the LMs are being invested in. Yeah, I think one of the fun stories of this year for us is going to be whether anyone finds that other sort of way to interact with VAI models, right? Like, even if you assume the tech doesn't get any better at all,

there's a lot of stuff left to do with it. And this idea of like, okay, everybody is out here exploring these different form factors, right? Everybody has landed on like the little sort of pill recorder thing that can take notes in all your meetings, great, fine, that's going to work. Meeting notes. Have you seen the rumor that Open AIs thing with Johnny I was a pen?

Yeah. This is, like, to me, one of the funniest outcomes of all this. Okay. Just like very straightforwardly, first of all, Johnny Avey's going to end up on a stage insisting that he's figured it out, then he's going to show you a pen. Right, like, I'm dying for this moment.

Do you think he's going to, like, dramatically pull it out of a pocket protector in his shirt? Right, like, when he's like, and how do you get rid of the point? and then you like clicks the pen. Like, it's all going to happen. And we're all going to experience that together as a family, and I'm very happy that we will be connected in that way forever.

Right? Like, that's going to be amazing. And then it's like, dude, you've taught everyone to just talk to these things for the long, you think they're going to write in longhand? Like, do you love me? There's just some disconnect in that thinking. And all of it, all of it comes down to what is the form factor for this thing? And I think they can't do it.

pin. They can't do the like little hockey puck that's going to sit up like those things are now being tried at scale. Everyone can see they're, everyone can see that they're not as usual as just having a phone. And if you've got to beat the phone, you got to go somewhere else. And it's like, sure, maybe it's a pen. Yeah. I mean, maybe it's a pen. I've also seen people who are building stuff that's more of a like desk object that it's like kind of an Alexa looking thing, but it's just for voice in and out with chat chvety. Maybe it's a fuzzy dog that talks to you. Like I don't know. I think this question of like this tech is now good enough that lots of people want to use it. Can we put it somewhere other than your phone? Is clearly the question. And it's like everybody

sort of thinks it's glasses, I think without very much confirmation that it's glasses, but everybody's just going to try other stuff. And I think that's going to be fascinating. But this was the same thing that happened to Alexa and Google Assistant here for years. Right? Where we would, we would show up and And they'd be like, here's what we did. We put Alexa in a smoke detector. And you would have to, like, I was like a baby journalist at this time. And I would have to sit there and look impressed because I thought that was part of my job. And now I'm like, really?

We think it's very different. You get old. You get old. Smart speakers was a real thing that happened. Lots of people have smart speakers. But smart speakers were the first one, right? People thought voice was going to be a thing. Now, again, the thing I keep going back to you is the LMs have conclusively reduced the, like,

brittleness of voice input. Yeah. You can just talk to the computer. You can say whatever you want to it. And it will agree that you're, that you're smart, which is incredible. Like, it's amazing. Can it turn around and do anything with that in one place?

It definitely can, right? And software development is conclusively proven that this is very useful, and it can do agenic stuff that is deeply confused people, whether their laptops are alive. Great. Like, all that's cool. I don't think you should discount that at all. In every other domain, it's like, I don't know. Yeah.

Right? And so on the show floor yesterday in meetings, I asked a lot of smart home people, like, I think the LLMs can run smart homes. I think this idea that Google Assistant can just look at all the stuff on my network and just get it right is like really hard. And basically everyone agreed with me. And here's a really surprising thing. They told me that they thought the AI browsers would get their first before the

smart home assistants. Interesting. Because if you're a browser company and you have the scale, you literally can sit there and look at every website. Yeah, you just have it. You can just go look at every website in the world. Like there's a lot of them, but there's actually, there's still a finite number.

And then there's a much smaller number of ones that people actually care about. And so they're like, we'll figure it out the agents and browsers before we figure out your crazy smart home. Because we can't just look at your house all day, every day, to figure it out. But we can look at the web all day every day to figure it out. That's interesting.

And I think that's going to be a real weird break for people. The other thing I heard that I thought was really interesting is that the browsers, you get to watch them work. So users are starting to learn to trust them. As you can see where they fail, they can ask you for help if they need it. They're just very transparently doing a thing,

whereas a voice-only assistant in your house, you don't know. You have to really trust it and it might just fail, and the first time it fails, you'll never talk to it again. And so, like, there's a real disconnect between you're going to put the AI in some other system, but it won't be obvious what it's doing,

the way that it's obvious right now in a chatbot showing its reasoning or in a browser clicking around, and that trust turn, you can see it all over CS, actually. So you want me to trust this like Furby? No, thank you. Yeah. Not at this time.

I think this is one reason these things are actually surprisingly successful desktop computer things. Actually, I'm curious. Folks in the audience, show of hands, do any of you talk out loud to your computer? Like, whether you use a program or Siri or whatever, do you spend time talking to your computer? Is it awesome?

Everyone I know who does this is like all of you are living in the past. I'm living in the year 3,000. Why are you typing? Don't ever type again. Just talk to your computer. And I think this is the sort of thing. Like you get, it is maybe having a big ass screen and a microphone is actually the correct answer. And like we're all just going to do laptops minus keyboards.

How romantic is the conversation you're having with this computer? This is my fear. It's like we're all slowly driven into just bonkers territory. If I'm being honest, I'm starting to worry that this is happening to you. I'm just reading our own coverage. It's like every day like other people. Every day it's like another person is like my laptop is alive and it loves me. And maybe that's true.

You know, who's to say? This brings me actually delayfully to my next trend, which is that we're doing weird computers again. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work?

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what if your laptop was different? And they were like, what if the screen moved? if there were five of them? What if instead of the keyboard being here and the trackpad being here, we just flipped them for no particular reason? And everybody, they just had this idea that like this was not the only correct answer for a laptop. And then they all decided they were wrong. And we went back to this being the only correct answer for a laptop. And now kind of out of nowhere, we're doing weird stuff again. Lenovo has a laptop with a screen that starts 16 inches like this and then just like pulls outward. It has another one that twists. We're doing the

rollable screen again. There's a... Aesuze has a... one that's two screens and is like, we're just out here doing stuff. Asous also has one that they say is GoPro inspired, which like, what is that? I don't know. There's one HP made a keyboard that has a whole computer inside, which I think is like an amazingly good idea. We think about these things is like, it's a Ti-I-99. That's a Commodore 64. But what we think about these things is like, you know, the laptop that you and I use and sit at all day. But if you're like a person out in the field who was like plugging into some terminal or hot swapping computers all the time. And all these things are, have just shoved into your keyboard.

Kick-ass idea. I'm into this. And in general, like, we're just, I don't, will anyone buy any of these things? Yeah. I don't know. But I just love that we're back to having weird ideas about laptops. I will say, the thing that gets me out of all these weird laptops is, like, Windows is in a state of complete insanity right now.

Yes. To the point where, like, the Windows-focused publications are like, I hate this. Yeah, because Satya Nadella is out here being like, you're not even going to use your computer anymore. It's going to use itself. And then it's super can't. That's barely a paraphrase. That's what he says. And so, like, there was a moment, I think, where Windows had achieved a level of, like, aesthetic consistency, reliability that, I think, sort of reinvigorated the laptop market.

And now we're seeing a bunch of these devices come out that have been in development. And it's like, and then you got to run. Windows 11 on it. And the first thing it's going to do is be like, I'm co-pilot. I will be in your way, no matter what you do for the rest of your life. And I, I'm just basically saying, these computers will all be great next year when they were on Linux. 2027 is the year of Linux on the desktop. I'm not going to lie to you, there is a real sort of uprising of Linux inside the Verge newsroom. And this is going to become a thing. Can I read you a really fascinating quote? So Kevin Terwilliger, who's Dell's head of product. By the way, Dell did the like,

low-key best thing of CES, which is get rid of its stupid new brand and go back to its better old brand. They're just making XPSs again. Thank you, Del. Great job. But Kevin Trelliger said to PC Gamer, he said, we're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device. In fact, everything that we're announcing here has an NPU in it. But what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI. In fact, I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome. like A, I appreciate the honesty and forthcomingness, but B, like, yeah, dude, duh. We've been doing this copilot plus PC thing for a minute.

Everybody is trying to explain whether Apple intelligence is going to be useful. There just has been this idea that we're going to AIify your laptop and that will change everything. And now we're back to like, but what if it actually just had more screens instead? And I feel like that's a more fun run of hardware right now. Yeah. And we're going to come to it. I think one of the other trends is like, what have we made the battery life good?

And like, it's as simple as it gets and it works every time. Yeah. I think that Dell learning this lesson is actually really fascinating for a number of reasons. One, like, you know, Dell's business is enterprise, like, through and through. And they're not even trying to pretend that they're doing AI at the enterprise. Sure. That's for someone else to figure out. I think the idea that the consumer demand for the free version of chat, GVT, has confused everyone.

fully confused everyone because a free robot that will just tell you that all of your questions are good is like a very different value proposition than like I need to buy this PC because it has AI in it and like I love the free version chat TV it thinks all of my questions and concerns are very smart and I that's great you know

did you accidentally put in like custom instructions to chat GPT that we're like you're in love with me and you think I'm so smart this would be a good prank to do on people by the way change it and then change it rapidly. No, I mean, like, it's, you know, they're just prone to being agreeable.

Yeah. And so, like, a free thing that we'll talk to you and be agreeable obviously is the most popular consumer app the last decade. Like, of course that thing is popular. I think Gemini is popular for the same reasons. None of that is, this is a reason to go by something else. Or this tech, this would be like if you're like,

people love AirPods, so they must love Bluetooth. I have to put Bluetooth in everything. Right. Right. It's like, that doesn't track at all. Like, this is an enabling technology that made a product people like. And I think Dell just got there really fast because they did it last year with AI PCs and everything. And they saw that there was no take up for it. I think Microsoft is going to quickly learn that lesson with this version of Windows.

It's not going to juice their sales anyway. And I think a bunch of the consumer brands we see here, Lenovo, LG, Samsung to some huge extent, they're all going to find out that just bundling the existing products does not make their fundamental products. any new, like, did you see the, it's Samsung has an AI soccer mode for their TVs. What? It's very good. And so here's what it does. This is great.

This is what it does. It pumps up the color to make the grass greener, and then it makes the crowd louder. That's not AI. You see what I'm saying. Yeah. I'm like, so you found the green dial and you turned it up. I can do that too.

Yeah. But you, I think that means the branding is getting diluted. I think it means people are getting confused. And I think we cover this so much. People don't like it. They also don't like AI. And I've talked to a million meetings yesterday.

And on the minds of this industry is the notion that Gen Z does not like AI. They don't like it. And so I think this is like a flash in the pan moment of all this AI branding. Because ultimately what they have to sell is capabilities. and like we made a soccer mode on our big TV is actually a nice capability. Yeah. Cool.

But there's nothing about that that has to be. If you just so many places if you just find and replace AI with the word software, everything just makes more sense. It's like so much of this is like genuinely cool, useful functionality, right?

Like it's, you and I talk about this all the time. Like the idea that you can just say a bunch of nonsense out loud and your devices will more or less understand and synthesize what you said is like a generational breakthrough

in technology. but it's not God, so everybody doesn't talk about it. But I think you're right, and I think we are slowly starting to pull back. And it was just interesting to see Dell very loudly be the ones who are like, we're, we overshot here. Let's pull back. Well, they're good. They're going to let Microsoft do the ads where the co-pilot does a bunch of stuff that

Antonio can't get it to do, and we're going to keep making those videos, and it's going to be great. Poor Antonio. Antonio is here. If you see him, just tell him you're sorry. All right, two more trends. You mentioned this one, but battery life is a, is a, feature here all over the place. Motorola launched a new smartwatch that

one of its big flagship features is that it has battery that lasts 13 days. I'm wearing a new pebble in part because the battery lasts like a month instead of a day. Motorola also put out a new tracking tag that its main thing as it has a long battery. There's a keychron

keyboard that whole thing is that it offers, I think it was 660 hours of battery which like, is that good for a keyboard? I don't know. There was a, there was an RV that will actually charge your EV truck as you tow it. So it's a trailer that will charge your truck. So it's a, it's a, it's just a huge battery that you can tow around.

But with a, with a, with a, with a hole in the middle that you can put some stuff. Yeah. Just checking. Very, very smart. Imagine the power bank on your phone. Yes. But I'm getting. It's like, anchor's like, make it bigger.

I don't see what the problem is here. But for so many years, lots and lots of people we talk to are like, I don't want my phone to be thinner. I don't want wild new specs. I want the battery to last a week instead of a day. And it actually feels like we're making small gestures towards that. That it's like, it's such an obvious quality of life thing to improve in these gadgets. And I think what I wonder is if a lot of the PC manufacturers have seen this from Apple, that it was like Apple Silicon got really good and kind of lapped the rest of the industry.

but the main thing is like my laptop lasts literally all day now and that never happened before and it feels like magic and there's just so many things there that it's like if you just stop turning all the other knobs and turn the battery knob you're going to instantly make all of your products more compelling and we've been waiting a decade for everybody to figure this out and it feels like they're finally starting to figure it out yeah I think there's two things there once the chips are getting massively more efficient yeah and the capability this is like us demanding to know if anybody like is actually like a smartphone gamer like are

there any android gamers out there wait is that a yes like a half a hand where you like yeah you're like you're like you're like you're like you're fine do you have a rog phone yeah you have a rog phone you should just come up here are you do you work for rog are you steve rog okay um uh steve rog is my best friend how dare you uh i mean there's just like a whole there's like a whole thing there where the chips got much more efficient and the uses of the chips did not go up higher. Right. So we're just using less battery to the same stuff as we were before. And maybe on the margin you're doing some more stuff with your phone than you were before, but like not really. Then I think the other piece of this, and we should keep coming back to this. These supply chains, these manufacturing chains are so mature. And like we covered Hoto Infantic right before Black Friday. Sean Hall started a great piece about them. And all the comments are like, we love these companies. All of these batteries are. sealed lithium ion batteries because the culture in China is sealed with the Mion batteries and everything, and then you just like make e-waste. And the reason for that, because we were both fascinated by this response to comments,

is because batteries are cheap there. They just put them in everything and they charge them and throw them away and they're cheap because they built the manufacturing capacity. And now I think you just see that in all of these products that are coming here. So you just have bigger batteries because they're cheaper because the supply chains are built in more reliable, you have more capacity, and then you have more efficient chips. All that is great. but it's again it's like you put the compute and the power and all these devices to what end is still I think the big question yeah yeah I agree all right I have one more trend for you yeah and then a game that I'm going to make you play that I'm very excited about um this last trend this isn't really new but it's it's just a thing that I have loved seeing over the last couple of years that I think has accelerated this year that I'm very excited about which is sort of tech that is furniture or home decor right like we're doing a smart home thing in particular now where

instead of the idea being, let's gadgetify your house, it's let's hide it all of this technology inside of your other stuff. And like IKEA is here doing a bunch of stuff. And IKEA has done kind of out of nowhere, made a bunch of really great smart home moves. They've shipped a bunch of stuff. A bunch of it is really cheap. But their stuff looks like lamps.

Like it just is a lamp that is smart. And it's weird that that's like a new exciting phenomenon. But the last time they did this weird thing with Sonos where they were like, it's a speaker. inside of a lamp, but the lamp is hideous and actually just looks like a speaker. It was like, we've accomplished nothing. But now I feel like, you know, we talked about this on the last episode, but like art TVs becoming kind of the norm in a lot of ways points at this same thing where it's like,

actually what we're learning is that we want fewer gadgety looking gadgets in our house, but we want more things to be smart. And that feels like the right answer to me. It's like I don't want to redesign my house to look like a spaceship. Yeah. From the 1950s. I want my house to just be smarter while it still feels like my house. And it feels like we are very slowly pushing towards that.

Give me examples of this. So I'll give you the IKEA's, you're going to make me say Swedish words now, aren't you? This sucks. The IKEA varmblixed. Victory is mine. That's all good. I think I said that right. I can just show everybody.

It's just a lamp that looks like a donut. It's just a lamp. Sure. Yeah, yeah. And IKEA did a bunch of buttons. I think the Lego smart brick, which I think is probably like the thing of CES, also kind of fits into this. Like, Lego didn't build some like wild, wacky new tech forward thing. They just like hit a bunch of stuff inside of a Lego brick.

Yeah. And that's like that in so many ways to me feels like more of the correct answer than let's keep inventing new form factors to put stuff in. Yeah. Which is why this is a take I'm going to get in trouble for at some point. I think the Open AI Johnny I've Penn is actually like a reasonably good idea. I cannot wait for you to start. Like, I do all my compute with longhand. I write out all my prompts.

Did you see the announcement this week? Meta updated the rayband displays. And one of the things you can do is now you can write, if you're wearing the neural band, you can write longhand with your fingers just on a surface and it will recognize it. Yeah. Yeah. This is the hot new thing, man.

We were on Palm Pilots doing the graffiti thing a million years. Like, we're so back. I mean, it's, I mean, it's great. I love the idea that I could just be like, this guy's kind of dumb. Just do like a smiley face emoji and that's how you do it. But that's like,

that's the thing they're shipping. And I think, but again, the bigger picture here is like technology that doesn't look so much like technology just feels like the right answer to me. And walking around, there's all of this like personal care stuff

that continues to kind of take over the show. There's a lot of like things that, you know, is a box fan technology. It's like a very fun, vergi question right now. and this idea of like how do we make a box fan that looks like a box fan but does more things than it has in the past

is such a more interesting idea to me than how do we sell you a box fan that looks like a spaceship because it has Bluetooth. Yeah. I mean, the fascinating thing about all of the, let's embed the sensors and smarts in the furniture is that stuff only works well if it all works together. Yes. And so the answer for most of these companies for years

has been to lock you in to the vicious LG think you prison or the Samsung Smart Things prison. I don't know if you've used these products. I hope Steve Smart Things isn't here. I'm sorry. But like these like walled gardens where you'd have to buy everything from one company and then like sort of it would work and sort of it wouldn't. That's all that. We talked about this on the last episode because of matter, because of these other standards,

because of thread, honestly. and you can just have dramatically higher battery life because the radios are much more efficient. You can just have all these startups being like, here's a device you can put in your house. Here's a bunch of sensors and buttons you can just put in your house. They're going to run matter over thread and they will connect to all the ecosystems you have now.

The turn is going to be when they connect and the house gets intelligent because it has sensors and software all over the place. I haven't yet seen that turn. As you see, Aquara is here. I think our headline was Aquara has something to prove, which basically... Another company, by the way, that's just sort of making all the things now because it can. And according to our headline, is ready to fight you.

It's good. But they have a lot of devices, and one of the most interesting ones is their thermostat, of all things, which is Apple adaptive thermostat or adaptive temperature. And Apple's going to read the temperature from all of your devices, all of your ICloud devices, and adjust the temperature in your house. Cool. It's neat. Yeah.

But you need to have some central platform. that's reading all these sensors and then taking action. And we just haven't made that turn. But you can see that at least making the sensors in all the devices because of a matter over thread is like quick. See, standards work, people. I'm not just a blind communist. I'm saying you're going to buy more stuff because we did standards. It's going to happen.

Yet again, I mean, I'm realizing the story of this year in so many ways is hardware being ahead of software. Like we are able to make things that don't work yet in so many parts of the world right now. It's really interesting. Okay. So the mic is now here, as promised. We're going to take a bunch of questions If you guys have them, if you don't, I can just say mean things to Neli for a while.

But first, Neely, we're going to very quickly play a game that I did not warn you about. This game is called Did It Ship? What I'm going to do is I'm going to read you the name of a bunch of products that we covered at CES one year ago. And these are not fly-by-night nonsense products. Every single one of these is pulled from the Verges list of the best of CES

from 2025. This is just a brutal own of our own coverage. We're doing our best here, folks. You get one point if you can tell me what the thing is, and another point if you can correctly tell me whether it shipped in the last 12 months.

You ready? Some of these are easy, and some of these are extremely not easy. I don't like this one. Go ahead. Okay. Thing number one, the Samsung Bali. What was it? Did it ship?

Oh, I know this one. I'll tell you why I know this one. It was a robot ball that had a projector that followed you around sort of like shading you by putting workout ideas on the wall at all times. Like, you know, doing push-ups over here all the time.

Yeah. I was like, would you like to do a core workout? Like, I see her at the fridge again. Did not ship, in fact, indefinitely held. And I will tell you that, I don't know if Chris Welch is here, ex-Vorge reporter, notable Verge ex-pack, Chris Welch,

excitedly texted me this morning. I was like, Bolly Scoop. And then several other people texted me because Samsung, it was a non-denial denial. This thing is not going to ship. Yeah, you're right. It did not ship. And yeah, it appears it's not going to. All right.

Thing number two, the Panasonic Z-95B. Another piece of bread. Have you thought about sit-ups today? Like, that was like every Bali demo. Anyway. The Panasonic Z-95B. It was TV. It shipped.

Had a really great soundbar built into it, but ran horrible software. I think it was Fire TV? I don't remember. See, I know. It got good reviews, though. People like it. People like the pitch. I love the sandbar, but I believe the software was devastating in many ways.

The Honda Zero. There's just like a lot of vaporware Honda cars at this show. It was a bike and it didn't ship. It was a car. Sure. And it didn't ship. Sure. And I was going to offer you a bonus point because there were actually two Honda Zero's.

There was the Honda Zero Saloon and the Honda Zero SUV. I remember the Honda Zero Saloon. It was like a futuristic station wagon thing. Yeah. Neither one shipped. The Sony Honda Afila is here every year. My children will go to college

and they will still be like, the afila is coming. Yeah. Okay, next, I'm going to do a couple more. If you have questions, now is a good time if you want to jump in front of that microphone. I'm just going to blow through a few of these.

The Rome soda top. Again, the best of CES list from the verge. The Rome soda top. The Rome soda top. I have no idea it was. It was a water bottle with a little thing on it

that turned and would carbonate your water for you. Did not ship. I was very excited about this. This is like a classic Kickstarter, did not ship. Correct. Did not ship. The Switchbot K20 Plus Pro, that's a real name.

So we learned at this CES, that Switchrod is actually owned by a much larger Chinese robotics company in the Switchbot One Arrow, which is their robot that they demoed, is actually a Chinese robot called the One Arrow. Say the name again? The Switchbot K20 Plus Pro. I can't believe you didn't remember that. This has got to be a vacuum. It feels like a vacuum.

It did ship. It was, in fact, a vacuum, but it was the vacuum that had a bunch of modular attachments. Sure. So that you could put an air purifier on top of it or you could put one of those like iPad stands on it. And that was literally a thing. And it did in fact chip. It exists. You, you too can put a-

I have one. Look, there's an iPad rolling around my house, cleaning the floors as we speak. There you go. All right, two more. The Swip It. No. Does anyone remember The Swip It? It was a phone toaster.

Does this jog any memories? Oh, yeah, the battery thing. We talked about this for a long time on stage. Did not ship. Did not ship. Sure didn't. The Lenovo Thinkbook plus Gen 6. That could be anything.

Like, literally any product could be named the Lenovo Think Book 4 Gen 6. Did ship. No idea what it is, but it shipped. So I'm going to give this one to you, but it exists in a strange place. This was the rollable laptop that we saw last year. It won our best in show. It got reviews, people. It exists in the world.

But if you attempt to buy one right now, you can't. And it says it doesn't exist. But they did come out with another version. Yes. So one of my favorite things is I have more on this list. And one of the funniest things about this year's CES is how many successors to these products that have not shipped are being shown at this year's CES. Just fabulous.

It's like, So many companies, and there are good reasons, right? Like tariffs made a lot of things really complicated for a lot of companies this year. There have been a lot of geopolitical things. So, like, there are good reasons to have not shipped stuff you launched. But it's just so funny to see companies be like, and now we have version two. And it's like, what about version one? And they're like, shh.

We don't talk about version one. All right, you did well. Good job. I'm proud of you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. And if you have a Rome soda top, please know that I will still be very excited about it.

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So we have like 13 minutes and then everybody starts yelling at us. So we're going to do as many questions as we can. Please just say your name and then whatever your question is. Great. Thank you. Hi, Alison Campbell.

I've seen a series of articles on AI's impact on brain development, especially as it relates to the younger populations and academics. I'd love to hear your guys as hot takes, on AI's impact on one's cognitive thinking, no matter the age of the person or the phase of life. David, that's a layup for you. There's our 13 minutes.

I mean, I will say, I don't, we are so early in all of this. I think the idea that AI is on its own making us stupid, which is a commonly held opinion increasingly, I think is maybe not unfounded, but too early to know. right? Like there's this thing that happens every time where everything is always going to melt our brands, right? Like throughout history, the radio was going to ruin society and newspapers were going to ruin society. And there's like, that is a thing that happens.

But there is something about what's happening right now that does feel different to me. And the idea that like, like cheating via chat GPT to write your papers in college is like a 100% mainstream activity right now. And that feels scary. Yeah. And there's already all of these things about like, you know, there were studies recently that book reading is going way down and people are engaging with things differently now.

And I think you can lay a lot of that at the feet of, like, social media before you do it at AI. But I think, I don't know, I land at like, I think this stuff is undecided, but also sort of worrisome to me. I'm much more on the worrisome front. But in, you know, some shaded way. Like, I don't think we should run large-scale experiments on human beings. Seems bad. Just me. Radical idea.

Fun is that. But you know, I've young children, and there's a way I want my daughter to use it, and there's a way I don't. I love that her curiosity is constantly being rewarded, right? So there's a Google home in our house, and she basically argues with it about space all the time. Like, I think she's trying to prove to Google that she knows more about space than it does. And I'm, like, completely happy for that to happen. Like, her curiosity is being rewarded. I'm there.

It's happening, like, together as a family that. That feels healthy and it feels something new that I'm eager to encourage. Then there's a part, and, you know, I'm a person, we write sentences for a living. Like, it's hard. It was hard to write sentences when we got started and you had to be good at it. There's a part where it's robbing people of the time it takes to develop their craft. And I don't know anything about the actual research going on in brain development, but I can see the laziness in the craft.

And I think that is actually very bad. And I think the idea that everyone was suddenly going to become a, great artist or a great writer because the AI tools, it won't happen because no one will have taken the time to develop their taste. The second you can get anything you want whenever you want it, you will never have the discernment to say, I don't want to spend my resources on that. This is the thing that I like. This is the thing that I want to spend my time making. And that, you know, there's a lot of arguments on slop and all this stuff, but I'm not going to let at least my children take that shortcut. Right. I want them to spend the time figuring out

how they want to spend their time and resources to get what they want. And then, then I think you can cheat. Thank. I appreciate you. Draw the damn picture of yourself. The rogue person is on my trip right here. I love it.

But I think that's like a, we're going to have to figure that out much more carefully as we go along here. No. Stephen Robleson. David, have you started using any more shortcuts since last we spoke? But a quick question for Nilai, too. After 16 CES is,

is there anything you get genuinely excited about seeing on the show floor, anything you saw this year that, I don't know, was actually exciting. I don't think I saw anything this year that, like, I mean, I'm a TV nerd, and there's, like, beautiful TVs this year. TCL has, like, wild backlights. Their TVs are so big that if you can be off-axis on the TV just by taking a step to the left and right, like, that's, like, fun. Like, that stuff didn't exist at all at anyone's inception a while ago. I do think the, like, general capability of the tech industry to have these ideas and like manufacture the hardware is really exciting this year. It's just none of it is ready. And I, I worry that the hype

cycle is actually going to deflate this balloon before any of these ideas can get the investment. But like what I'm excited about this year is very much like, oh, you can see what it'll happen when it starts to work. But yeah, the gadgets I'm excited about are still like TVs and speakers. Like, did I spend 15 minutes in the Clipsch booth looking at the new highest end Clipch speaker? Like, I absolutely did. Do I need them in any way, shape, or form? I do. I already have the old versions.

Like, they're fine. But I'm still an A.B. nerd at heart, and that's where I'm always, like, drawn to. What you are for TVs and speakers is what I am to, like, weird shit you can ride around. So, like, anything that Segway makes that is, like, here's a self-balancing thing, you'll probably fall off of. Yeah. That's my stuff right there. I went and saw this company called Infinite Machine. I don't know if you know, this company, they make basically,

I have had two people independently describe it as the cyber truck of scooters, which you can take however you would like. But they basically made this thing. It is legally an e-bike, but it's faster. It has a throttle. It kind of feels like you're on a mini scooter. And I just wrote it around a parking lot. And I was like a kid in a candy shop.

Like, this is the most fun thing ever. I'll never buy it. And I don't know if I'll ever see it anywhere ever again. But it's like, just give me weird things. so right around and I'm happy man. All right, let's keep going. My name's Eric Korn. I appreciate y'all's coverage earlier this year on accessibility and the meta raybans.

I saw a bunch of AR or AI glasses today that are essentially just green text. The best use case that I can see is for accessibility for death and hard of hearing. Are there other AI products that you're seeing where accessibility is leading the way? Good question. I mean, A, shout out V-Song, who is not a lot of very good coverage on this front for us. I think a lot of what we're seeing with AI is going to be really interesting accessibility technology.

I think one of the things, I mean, you have speech to text and text to speech, both of which are very good and very useful in that sense. Machine translation is quietly getting really good. We're at a place now where it's funny when it makes mistakes and it still does make mistakes, but it is,

I think in most cases for most people, passably good enough. And that's really a hugely powerful. thing. We've seen some really interesting stuff recently for people who are hard of hearing because you have these incredible algorithms that are able to pick up your voice and are able to noise cancellation has gotten vastly better in the last couple of years because of this stuff. So I think it's, to me, the exciting stuff is the sort of combination of all of these things where you're able to do, I forget who made it, but there was a pair of open ear headphones

this year at somewhere at CES that had surprisingly good noise cancellation, which is a very hard thing to do. But for somebody who is hard of hearing, it ends up being really powerful. You get to sort of be in the world while also having it tuned for you. And I mean, this goes back to what Apple's been doing with the AirPods as hearing aids. There are all these kinds of little things that I'm starting to see. And I'm less bullish in a lot of ways on what just sort of interacting with an LLM will do for you in that sense. But what the kind of underlying machine learning technology is able to do. I think we're seeing show up in lots of places.

Yeah. I think also we're going to see all this robotic tech applied to prosthetics in a very fast and very direct way because it's more narrowly constrained domain. Like the opportunity, like you're not trying to sell, here's a robot that can do everything to everyone. You're trying to sell a solution. And I think you're going to see that happen very quickly. So that's all exciting.

And we're definitely going to keep covering. My name is T.J. Huddleston. I have unfortunately installed thousands of Samsung frame TVs. And I'm wondering if anybody's come out with a good net. I wonder if anybody's come out with a good frame TV alternative this year. We've seen the Amazon Fire TV where they basically just slapped a different color bezel on it. But it's literally the same exact TV and everything else. LG has released a frame TV of some sort.

Is there anybody that I can actually sell now instead of Samsung? So real quick. I feel like I'm about to take the microphone off the stand and do like a hot half hour. This is pacing the stage. We have five minutes and multiple other people. But first of all, just real quick, can you just move your badge so we can see that t-shirt?

Just shouts to that t-shirt. Hey! We got a Brennan Carr as a dummy t-shirt. That's very good. That's very good. I appreciate you, sir. Yeah. Brendan Carr, by the way, somewhere in Vegas. If you see him, give him our love.

We're giving one of those t-shirts. I love that. That's very good. All right. What is a frame TV competitor? No, no, no, no, no. Faster. Faster.

Faster. Faster. Faster. Faster. Yes, there are bad TVs that will show you a picture that you can frame at CS all over the place. I actually think it's TCL has one that runs Google TV this year,

I believe. I would point more people at that because you just want not Tysin in your house. Just like whatever not Tysen choice you can make is the choice you should make. I think Samsung's, they've obviously got a lead on like the image quality. Sorry.

But as you've mentioned, is like out of his mind. Yeah. I love it. I love Samsung. I love, you're screaming. I love Samsung. Samson Saturday is right there.

We're going to do a whole show with you later. After this is done, it's just you solo show. Anyway, I think that the new competitors are really interesting because they will not have the single greatest weakness of the existing frame TV,

which is Tys in. Are they going to look as good as works of art, which is what people actually care about? I don't know. Like, I think we have to actually look at them. But I would say, like, Tyson is so bad, especially on the frame TV, that that is the competitive metric that I would pick in this way. Good one.

All right, we got three minutes. We're going to do as many as we can. And then we're all going to be around for a while after. Let's do this. What do you got? Hi. Make it quick. I guess so I feel like on the show floor there's been a lot of like build for like interop this year.

I see a lot of like SICs that are like the little RF radios for thread or matter. So then that seems a bit at odds with like your intermediary beat, right? Like the door dash problem? Because it's like I don't see the value in saying here's a standardized wireless chip. Because it's like Bluetooth wasn't built for the AirPods. Yeah. So it's like, do you guys see that with like the smart home as a sort of disintermediary of like getting Google to actually make a working smart home? If that makes sense.

It's the dream. Right? Like that is that if all of this works, that that problem is solved. it becomes a point where we're actually competing on product quality instead of just everybody hoping you get into their wild garden and then you're in and it's too hard to leave and lock in becomes real. Yeah, I mean, Matter itself is an extension of Home. Like Apple basically was like, we don't want to build all these products.

We don't want to certify all these products. Like just take the basics of HomeKit. We're going to turn it into Matter. So they had a big incentive to do that in a way that they're not going to do with the H1 chip in the AirPods, which extends Bluetooth. And the reason for that is, I think they would rather compete on, here's how smart our home assistant is. Here's how not home assistant itself.

Home assistant is very smart. I know if Paulus is here. He was here last year. But here's how smart our assistants are they can operate all these devices in your home. We do not want to be responsible for manufacturing these devices, for designing them, for ongoing software support. We just want to know how to use them. So there's a big, I think there's a lot of industry incentive to make sure matter keeps developing. What I have not yet seen from any of these companies,

think this is going to be where the centralization comes back is what you actually want is to set up an Alexa in your house that already has Google Assistant in it and have it just work. And right now you're kind of just setting it up all over again, but you haven't disconnected. And at some point you need to say like Alexa just talk to Google and get all my room data and all the devices and configure them so that I can talk to you too. And there's no incentive for the companies to build that unless, you know, we complain about it more loudly. So that's what we will be doing from that one. Yeah. Yeah. That's there. There's more to talk about there. We should talk about it. But we're almost at a time. We got one more to do. Let's do it.

All right. Last but not least. I know. Don't blow it. Pressure is really hot. All right. First of all, hi. My name is Janie Park. I come from the beauty, fashion, luxury, retail industry. So my question is going to be more about wearables. Um, there were, last year, there was, um, Fred necklace that dropped that straight up looked like an Apple air tag. and on a lanyard, I'm sorry if anyone here works for a friend, but I'm going to just keep it real. And there's another similar one that actually was on the floor this year at CES. For me, when I look at it, I feel like wearables need to be wearable fashion tech,

where it's actually an accessory that people want to wear. What do you see as some options and technology that's coming out or sort of the overlooking trend forecast, since you are really in the trenches when it comes to the tech? and, you know, covering what's going on. But where is the future headed when it comes to wearables? I think you have the correct idea pretty much pegged, right? Like, the idea that these things should look good is surprisingly uncommon in this space,

but is, I think, pretty clearly the right answer. The problem is just that it's hard, right? Like, it's very hard to make jewelry that people like much less with a battery and a USBC port in it. But I remember, we've gone through various. phases of this, right? At the early days of the Apple Watch, there was this obsession with fashion, and they've since gone, you know, much more sort of like utilitarian health direction. Fitbit at one point tried to make stuff that felt more like jewelry. We've kind of been at this for a while. But like, you know, Neely, you talk about this all the time, the Neely's

theory of wearable bullshit that is the graph that doesn't make any sense. That like... It makes sense. If the pitch is that we are all going to put this stuff all over our bodies, it just has to look good and it has to be infinitely styleable and it has to be personalized in meaningful ways and like frankly I don't see very much of that anywhere I think there's interesting versions of that in like personal accessories like there's a lot of there there's a lot of the like dyson air wrap knockoff stuff running around and that stuff is being sort of developed to be nicer looking and feel less like a crazy magic wand yeah but in terms of like the actual

wearables of it all, it feels like we're still in the everybody is trying to sell you a gadget on your body phase, and it's the wrong phase. So the products have to do things, which is a very difficult challenge because mostly what you want them to do is health and wellness stuff. Vsong and I had a conversation a few weeks ago

and I was like, your wearables beat is turning into the wellness beat tomorrow. Right? Because mostly what people want these things to do is measure their vital signs or lie to them about protein or whatever it is you need them to do. and your body is like bad at having things mounted to it. And so you end up with a bunch of rings, right?

You end up with weird headbands. Like you just end up with stuff that has to get to the utility of the product before it can be fashion. And I think that's why you see mostly rings this year because it's the closest you can get to the right answer given the state of the technology and what people want to use it for. I don't know what the utility of all the other stuff is. And I think that's why it tends to fail. Because once you're like, we're going to make sure the product is beautiful, but that's going to compromise what it's for. You might as well not have it and pick something that you actually want that is truly beautiful.

And I think that dynamic is going to keep playing out until we figure out some other use for wearables that isn't just wellness. And then the wellness category is, I mean, that's just a weird, unregulated pharmaceutical industry that's going to tell you lies about whatever it needs to tell you lies about. And that's going to accelerate until V goes crazy. Do you remember? I love you, V. Do you remember Project Joucard, Google's thing with the, the, they were, they like wove something into the fabric of your jacket that let you use it. Believe I should. Like, there's something in that, right?

That it's like it doesn't, it doesn't look or feel different, but it gives you some new capability. That's where this has to go. And I don't think we figured out either what the capability is or how to get there in most cases. But it's an interesting direction. All right. We've got to get out of here. We are so grateful to all of you for coming out. Thank you to everybody for being here.

This has been incredibly. fun. Thank you. All 30 to 40,000 of you who are here, we're very grateful. There is. Very good. We've got more CES stuff coming. Our team is still chugging away. But we've got other stuff to do. We're going to get out of here. So we will see you next time, Nilai. Crack and roll.