Seems like everyone forgot the 'Consumer' part of the Consumer Electronics Show this year

Seeing all things AI at a tech tradeshow is hardly unusual these days. However, there was something about the tenor of CES 2026's tidal wave of AI announcements that really got under my skin—namely, many of the exhibitors seem to have forgotten the 'consumer' part of this electronics tradeshow.

Now, I know it wasn't AI all the way down. There was still plenty of delightful CES weirdness in the form InWin's fresh signature chassis that looks not unlike a futuristic glass egg, as well as yet another rollable laptop concept machine from Lenovo. I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention at least one questionable consumer doo-dad too, such as Lollipopstar, a lollipop that attempts to turn "candy into a concert in your mouth." No, I will not be elaborating further.

But, even setting aside the hours our poor Andy spent locked inside Lenovo's AI sphere of despair, a number of exhibitors at this year's CES focussed on AI. Gigabyte is among the most obvious examples; united under the banner of 'AI Forward', Gigabyte dedicated exhibition floor space to both local AI development offerings in the form of its AI Top series, alongside server hardware like its modular "one-stop AI data center solution" the Gigapod. That's already a lot of enterprise-geared hardware at a consumer tradeshow, but that's not all that ground my gears at CES this year.

Surprising perhaps no one, both AMD and Nvidia were also talking up local AI solutions geared towards consumers. Cloud-based AI is still swimming in money thanks to various partnerships, but it makes sense that both companies would also be looking to put tidy nest eggs into AI running locally from a device that, say, runs off their consumer grade hardware. That said, there is something about all of the local AI talk at CES 2026 that sounded ever so slightly desperate to me.

AMD's Lisa Su and IBM's Arvind Krishna say that there is no AI bubble, but there's a reason Bloomberg made its graphic charting recent AI investments look ever so circular. Long story short, the AI industry is currently staring down the challenge of creating a 'killer app' or feature that consumers will want to spend money on. Without that special something funnelling revenue back into the industry, it may go out with a bang potentially four times louder than the subprime bubble burst that caused the 2008 crash.

There's just one problem: the average consumer is simply not very interested in AI—even if it can give you 'wardrobe tips'. To echo our Jacob's feature, 'who asked for this?' What practical advice can an LLM with no body give a plus size girlie like me? I'd rather seek out another plus size human than ask a holographic avatar 'Is this too much or not enough?' But besides my anecdotal objections, some of the major players are also taking note of lacking consumer appetite.

Following a surprisingly AI-lite CES 2026 presentation from Dell, head of product Kevin Terwilliger said during the Q & A session, "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."

Finally, someone said it. For a start, I've been saying we need a better name for AI for ages (I'm still quite fond of my sister's suggestion 'Regurgitated Intelligence,' but let's move on). For one thing, the current name vastly oversells the machine learning tech's capabilities. For another, much of the popular conversation scoops up everything from chatbots based on Large Language Models, to medical research tools and even in-game enemy behaviour and crams it into the 'get-along' shirt of AI—no wonder some consumers are confused.

The fact of the matter is that only sickos really want a machine that can thrash against a 235 B parameter AI model (our Dave would personally recommend the Framework Desktop PC, our pick for the best AI Mini PC). If that just so happens to be what floats your boat, then you'll already know just how much RAM that requires, not to mention just how much more that costs these days.

Amid multiple cost of living crises and with how much consumer-grade hardware now costs due to the memory supply crisis, everyone is feeling the pinch, right? Well, maybe not so much big tech—for example, Samsung is already estimating it made a record-breaking $13 billion in operating profits during Q4 of 2025. Perhaps many CES exhibitors didn't so much 'forget' the consumer as simply retrain their eyes on the prize, IE businesses and investors that still have plenty of money to burn in the AI sector.

Yeah, I even made myself shudder with all of that cynicism—so, allow me to shake some of it off with a few reasons to be hopeful about consumer hardware. For a start, it's worth noting that as far as the 'consumer' part of CES goes, Be Quiet remembered the assignment with its suite of near-silent PC components.

Furthermore Micron, who we were all pretty sure was done with consumer-grade memory and storage when it shuttered its Crucial sub-brand last year, also announced an extremely speedy PCIe 5.0 QLC client SSD this week. As far as affordable memory goes, things may also be looking up thanks to Phison's E37T SSD controller too.

As for hardware a bit more broadly, AMD Ryzen chief David McAfee said the company is "very actively working on" reintroducing older processors to lessen the impact of the memory crisis on consumers (and there are rumours Nvidia is considering a similar tactic with the RTX 3060 GPU, too). Which is perhaps just as damning about the current state of affairs as much as anything else—I did try to end on a hopeful note, I promise!