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It's a historically hideous season. It's our 100th ugly house. And if these walls could talk.
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Do you cry a lot? I do.
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Ugliest house in America. Season premiere Wednesday at 8 on HGTV.
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Welcome to day one of our CES 2026 coverage. You can look forward to getting ces Tech News five days in a row instead of the regular three with special guests in the midweek. Because in 2026, what happens in Vegas ends up on the Internet. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took to the stage at CES in his trademark leather jacket and basically said, the future's robots, and we're building all of it. Nvidia is building the robots and also the chips those robots run on, and also the software and also the simulation tools. It's Nvidia's all the way down. The headline is the Ruben platform, their next gen AI supercomputer with six integrated chips, including the Vera CPU with 88 custom cores and a Ruben GPU packing 336 billion transistors. Which is more. Nvidia claims five times the performance of Blackwell and a 10x reduction in inference costs. They also unveiled Alpa Mayo, which I thought was an expensive mayonnaise brand, but it's apparently the first reasoning AI for autonomous vehicles. Jensen showed a car navigating San Francisco, supposedly thinking through decisions in real time, which is more than I can say I do. Nvidia announced that they're open sourcing it, which either means they're very confident or they want everyone else to do the bug testing. Talked about lowering inference costs, but the real showstopper was when Star Wars BDX droids walked on stage the exact same way they did last year, but this time they were fully autonomous. Trained on Nvidia's Cosmos AI models. Partners like Boston Dynamics, LG and Caterpillar showed off robots running Nvidia silicon, which sounds impressive until you realize Nvidia's entire business model is now we sell the shovels in every gold rush simultaneously. Autonomous cars, Nvidia chips, humanoid robots, Nvidia chips, AI data centers. Believe it or not, Nvidia chips. I'm sure nothing can possibly go wrong with a single company building the infrastructure that's propping up the entirety of the US Economy. Love it or hate it, though, at this point, one thing's for sure. Jensen is building the cyberpunk dystopia that matches his cool leather jackets. I guess that's. That's Mad Max. One big desert. There's a phone with a robot arm now. Honor unveiled the Robot Phone, a device with an actual 3 axis gimbal camera that pops out of the back like something out of a Transformers movie. The camera can rotate 360 degrees, track your face autonomously, and basically turn your phone into a DJI OSMO that also calls your mother or doesn't call her sorry. Honor's calling it part of their $10 billion alpha plan for AI devices, which sounds like something a Transformers villain would announce before Shia LaBeouf shove the AllSpark into its shiny metal ass. No pricing yet and it launches at Mobile World Congress in March, which isn't CES and we care about ces, but if you've ever thought my phone needs more moving parts, then this is your moment. And if you want the exact opposite clicks unveiled the Communicator, a full BlackBerry style phone with a 4 inch AMOLED display, minimalist UI, physical QWERTY keyboard, headphone jack by Gresdla, and a fingerprint sensor in the space bar here. It's $499, runs Android 16, and is marketed as the best second phone on the planet because apparently one phone isn't enough Anxiety. Here's some more Haining Towal showed off what they're calling the world's thinnest tablet, so thin it makes the iPad Pro look like Kirby after inhaling an entire Panda Express. TCL brought back Max Ink Mode on their next page paper 70 Pro to allow you to experience what it would be like if the page Master designed a smartphone and solver. Announced customizable magnetic haptic buttons for phones. Like allowing you to bind whatever action or string of actions you want. Like quickly launching your I'm pooping at work timer and making a new entry in your how much money do I make while pooping at work Spreadsheet? I'm up to 85 bucks in 2026 already, baby. Samsung brought some of the literally biggest news at CES, showing off their massive 130 inch R95H micro RGB TV. Unfortunately they didn't provide pricing or availability deals for this wide boy, so who knows when we'll get to see Linus try to lug it into his house. But not only did Samsung unveil a big ass TV, they also revealed a bright ass TV with their 77 inch QD OLED panel capable of reaching up to 4500 nits. Samsung touts it as the world's brightest self emissive display. Naturally, it's not tech in 2026 without AI in the mix, so Samsung also revealed some new TV AI based software. For example, AI Sound Controller Pro is gonna let you mess with the volume of background noise including music and crowds to provide you with a personalized listening experience. As a purist, I hate this. Not to be left out of the CES fun, LG previewed their 2026 OLED TV lineup featuring the new G6 that boasts a more advanced Tandem OLED Panel with about 20% higher brightness and greatly reduced reflections and the C6 series, everyone's favorite now upgraded to tandem OLED, big ass TVs, bright ass TVs and even flat ass TVs. LG also showed off its ultra thin wallpaper OLED design and with the LG OLED Evo W6, a wireless 9 millimeter thin OLED TV that sits flush to the wall and pairs with a separate Zero Connect box. Finally, Amazon said we like flat TV too and debuted the Ember Art Line TV, a thin art focused 4K lifestyle TV with a matte screen, customizable frames and Amazon Photos integration that seems ready to directly compete with Samsung's Frame TVs. Thank God because those they stink. You know I've said it. Plus Amazon is kicking off 2026 with a major redesign of Fire TV's interface and mobile app that's meant to be cleaner, faster and easier to navigate. Now let me assure you to our sponsor, Saily Strive James Strive International man of mystery in my line of work, staying connected is mission critical. That's why I use Saily. I downloaded my Esim once and it works across borders without the hassle of swapping SIM cards when I land. Whether I'm visiting one country or many, a single global or regional plan keeps me connected in over 200 destinations while assassinating roaming FE. Yeah, Saily would be great for anyone with a mission at CES 2026 in Las Vegas. Plus I never blow my cover with suspect sim sellers. With Saily, I'm connected the moment I arrive on iOS or Android with 24. 7 support. Quiet, reliable and always ready. Just like a good spy should be. Get an exclusive 15% discount on saily ESIM data plans today. Download the Saily app and use code techlinked at checkout. We like to have fun here. The quick bits are angry they didn't get to go to Vegas with the crew, but they keep it professional. They showed up today focused and on task. By golly, Riley raised him right. Western Digital's WD Blue and WD Black SSD branding is officially dead with SanDisk replacing them with a unified Sandisk Optimus lineup. The new range introduces three clear performance tiers, Optimus Optimus GX and Optimus GX Pro to better differentiate mainstream gaming and high end NVMe SSDs. I think I speak on behalf of everyone when I demand to know if these drives can transform into a truck or gorill. If they can't, what are you even doing? Sandisk More Companies are Reacting to rising RAM Prices in an interview with Reuters, Samsung Co CEO TM Roh said that this situation is unprecedented and no company is immune to its impact. Roh didn't dismiss the possibility of increasing product prices, noting that some effect was inevitable outside of ces. That inevitable impact is already here, with Taiwanese retailers already raising laptop prices by roughly 15 to 20% following ASUS's announcement of of higher notebook and gaming PC prices starting January 5th. That's TA D. To be clear, we're not just talking about Asus. Laptops from Acer, hp, Dell, MSI and Gigabyte have all seen price increases. At least Taiwanese retailers aren't copying Corsair, who sparked backlash by canceling confirmed orders for DDR5 RAM kits due to a pricing mistake and lack of stock, but then relisted them at much higher prices before offering apology coupons that were already expensive. Fired high performance ram, terrible customer service AI is everywhere at CES 2026 with a ton of stuff leaving us asking why is this even a thing? First and almost Certainly most importantly, Amazon's Alexa finally went public in early access, but AI's also showing up in Bosch coffee machines. Samsung teased its Wild AI OLED cassette player and turntable, blissfully bringing AI into a scene usually occupied by people trying not to deal with AI. GE unveiled its smartest fridge ever with a built in barcode scanner for effortless grocery shopping and AI even snuck into an Ice Cube machine. We're reaching a Rule 34 like moment here. If something exists, there's a version of it with AI built in. The shareholders are titillated. The PR nightmare continues for XAI as multiple countries are now investigating the organization. In the aftermath of Grok generating sexually explicit images of women and minors, France, Malaysia and India have all either opened investigations or issued orders to the company. After Grok was caught generating CSAM X's response, it allowed Grok to issue a user prompted heartfelt apology from the Grok account, which was somewhat undercut by the fact that it had also issued a user prompted statement that it was absolutely not sorry telling users that it's revolutionizing tech, not babysitting sensitivities. India gave x72 hours to fix it or lose legal immunity from liability for user generated content, meaning X would be legally liable for all the content people post on the platform. The which could result in Elon Musk getting sued by Nintendo over all the Super Mario Bros. Fan art I posted back in high school. A lot of chemicals in my body back then Microsoft has quietly killed phone activation for Windows and Office, forcing everyone into online only activation tied to a Microsoft account. We're done here, boys. The support site still lists phone activation as an option, but if you call the number, you'll get a message saying support for product activation has moved online, as YouTuber Ben Kleinberg discovered. So if you're trying to activate Windows on an old machine without the Internet, your offline alternative, according to Microsoft, is now going online. I know people say this every year, but this might actually be the year of the Linux desktop. Man, all this talk of Linux and Vegas has me in a gambling mood. I'm hitting the casino. Don't forget to come back tomorrow for even more CES coverage. That's right, five nights of tech news, baby. Jesus. Line them up.