00:00As CES 2026 continues to showcase the future of consumer technology, one of the largest questions is which innovations will actually change the way we live, play, and interact with tech.
00:12From AI everywhere to smarter toys and advancing robotics, this year's show is full of lots of big promises and lots of chatter as well.
00:19Lucky for us, Sean Hollister is there on the ground in Vegas.
00:23Sean is senior editor and founding member of The Verge.
00:25Thanks a lot for joining us, Sean.
00:26Great to have you here today.
00:28Well, it's good to be here.
00:30So let's start with Lego.
00:33Yeah, that Lego made a lot of big waves with an announcement of a smart brick.
00:37It's a tiny computer inside of a classic Lego brick.
00:40How big of a deal is this type of technology?
00:44Oh, gosh.
00:45Toys.
00:46Toys are wonderful.
00:47I love all forms of toys, but smarts don't always work in toys.
00:53Lego itself, the Lego group, had a previous smart toy called the Lego Mario collection.
00:57And these were very, very specifically designed to be Lego Mario, Mario jumping around, Mario in the Mario cart, driving around a race course.
01:06They were limited in what kids' imaginations could do with them.
01:09And they were large.
01:10They required these triple A batteries.
01:13These Lego smart bricks are a classic two-by-four brick.
01:17It can fit right between my fingers right here.
01:19And they have so much smarts packed inside there.
01:24They can be all kinds of things that the Lego company wants them to be because if you drop them onto an NFC tile, like when you use your credit card to tap to pay at the store, you drop them onto these little NFC tiles that tell them through radio frequencies what they should become.
01:40And so the smart brick will become an X-wing fighter from Star Wars.
01:46They will become a little pet that you can stroke your finger along its tail and hear it purr.
01:53They will become a duck.
01:54And then you can take that duck, that quacking duck tile, and stick it onto another piece of Lego, say a helicopter.
02:00And then when you spin the helicopter's blades, instead of hearing it go whir, whir, whir, you hear it go quack, quack, quack.
02:06Kids are going to love this.
02:07How has it been received so far, all the cool tech, the evolution of the Lego system in play that you're talking about?
02:18What's been the chatter there in Vegas?
02:20The reaction has been tremendous, but it's also been intriguingly bifurcated.
02:25A lot of people are coming in to say, well, shouldn't kids' imaginations lead how you play with toys, how you play with Lego bricks?
02:34Why would you want this little brick that you have to charge up with its battery, make these sounds and do these lights and do these things when kids' imaginations can do that?
02:43I can just go pew, pew, pew with my mouth if I'm flying ships around.
02:46But what we're finding out is that it's smarter than that.
02:51The bricks are very intelligent in how they can sense one another's rotation and position.
02:57So if you place a little minifigure close to a brick, and you put another little minifigure close to that brick, you can have Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker or Leia sitting around this mini brick.
03:05And they'll talk to each other.
03:07You can place one in the front of a police car, you can put a robber in the front of a police car, and a cop in the back, and the cop will wake up and be like, ah, what's going on?
03:16My car's being stolen.
03:18This kind of interaction is something we haven't really seen much of in toys.
03:23They promise to do some of this stuff with AI.
03:25But the other interesting thing about the bifurcated reaction here at CES is people love that this does not have AI in it.
03:32It is a smart toy that actually seems smart, but it doesn't use AI like so many of the other half-baked concepts at CES.
03:39It feels like a breath of fresh air in that regard.
03:42If you, by the way, I'm in the old school camp of going pew, pew, pew, but yeah, you know, you highlight the additional toys and the opportunities there.
03:51More broadly at CES, you mentioned AI, but you also said sometimes that the AI iteration or the rollout could be a bit half-baked for other companies.
04:00What other big announcements or things have people been talking about or things that have most stood out to you so far, Sean?
04:06Robots, robots are everywhere at CES, but so many of the robots we've seen, it is more of a little technology demonstrator, many of them that don't quite work, than something you would actually bring into your home.
04:20Everybody wants to create this AI robotic helper.
04:23You bring in your home and it'll be, you know, Rosie and the Jetsons, it'll do, it'll fold your laundry and so on.
04:29We're kind of there, but the robots that really work are still your vacuum cleaner, your Roomba on the floor.
04:37And so now we're just giving them legs so they can climb upstairs and things like that.
04:41But one thing that also really struck me at this year's CES is that OLED monitors, which have been wonderful, OLED screens, have been wonderful new technology.
04:52Many people are starting to bring them into their living rooms.
04:55We've all got them in our phones already.
04:57They make everything you look at look better.
04:59They are finally getting better at letting you work on them, too, seeing text crisply because of the way they've changed the subpixel arrangement.
05:09I know this is a little dirty.
05:10They've changed it so that you have a true red, green, and blue stripe of colors that takes away some of the color fringing that made it difficult to read text on these screens.
05:20So right now you've got them in your living room.
05:22Maybe all of the offices around the world will start to have these crisp and beautiful monitors for workers, too.
05:29Let's go back to the robots for just a second.
05:31Are we talking more humanoid robots at this point?
05:34What is the latest iteration of robotics that you see?
05:37Because I'd imagine there at CES you also have a pretty impressive trade floor showroom where a lot of these things are being demonstrated and shown in real time.
05:47Yeah, yeah, yeah.
05:48We've watched robots shake our hands.
05:54We're watching them kick box.
05:56We've seen nimble graspers try to pull things up.
06:01We've seen them fold laundry.
06:03We're seeing these vacuum cleaners pop out a pair of legs and try to climb upstairs.
06:08There's a new phone coming where instead of just a standard set of camera lenses on the back to take pictures,
06:16it'll pull plop out a whole robotic arm with a gimbal on it, stabilized gimbal that'll follow you around as you do things.
06:23You just plop your phone on the counter and it'll film things for you, allegedly.
06:29I'll take one of the robots that folds laundry.
06:32I really don't think I need it for very much else.
06:34That's just one of those things I get to every week.
06:35I'm like, oh, I need to do the hard part.
06:37I got to do more of the hard part.
06:38So anything that just wants to come in and do it for me, I'm all for.
06:42Before we wrap up, let's take a step back.
06:44How so far does the 2026 version of CES stack up with previous years?
06:49Are there recurring themes that we hear from once again?
06:52Or is there something a little bit new that you've seen in the offerings so far for CES attendees that you have not noticed in previous years?
07:00There's certainly more robots and more AI demos than ever.
07:07They want everything to be AI now.
07:10And that's why this Lego smart brick feels like such a breath of fresh air.
07:14But, you know, we always get big screens at every one of these shows.
07:18We've got giant RGB, mini LED TVs.
07:23You could walk through the showcases full of being totally surrounded by these screens.
07:29And that hasn't changed in many years.
07:32CES has always been a screen show.
07:34It's always been a car show to some small degree.
07:37And now it's a huge AI show, too.
07:42Sean Hollister, terrific breed on everything going on in the ground there in Vegas.
07:47Senior editor and founding member of The Verge.
07:48Join us from the one and only CES.
07:50Sean, thanks a lot.
07:51Come back anytime.
07:52Great conversation.
07:53Thank you for having me.
