TWiT 1066: A Supercomputer in Your Pocket - CES & the Next Leap for On-Device AI Power

[00:00:00] It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech. It's our annual CES wrap-up and we have three great hosts who were at CES this year. Padre, Father Robert, Padre SJ, Jennifer Patterson-Tui from The Verge and Jason Heiner. CES it turns out was a pretty interesting show this year from robots that fall over to toilets that take pictures of your business. We will cover it, all of it, next on TWiT.

[00:00:31] Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT, This Week in Tech. Episode 1066, recorded Sunday, January 11th, 2026. A Supercomputer in Your Pocket.

[00:00:54] It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech. Hello everybody, time to talk about the week's tech news. And of course this week was CES. And so we have our traditional yearly CES panel. Jennifer Patterson-Tui is here. She is a senior reviewer at The Verge and covered all sorts of stuff at CES. How many days at CES did you spend? Oh, gosh. I got there on Saturday and left on Friday. That's too long. That's too long. I'm sure you felt the same way.

[00:01:23] Yes, I did. One of our regular Scott Wilkinson wears a pedometer at CES every year and covers 30 miles typically. I mean, just a huge... Wow. Yeah. It can be pretty exhausting, but it's also like for a tech nerd, it's like the Oscars and Christmas and the Super Bowl all at once.

[00:01:42] Maybe this year. Yeah. Also with us, Jason Heiner. He is a former editor in chief at ZDNet, now editor in chief at The Deep View, which is an AI website and newsletter, which you should subscribe to because it's free. And actually, Jason is making his second appearance this week. You called us from McCarran Airport in Vegas as you were leaving Las Vegas on Wednesday. Yes. Yes. We got a quick report, but now I want all the deets. The full deal.

[00:02:09] All the deets. And also with us, our annual reporter from CES, Father Robert Ballasier, the digital Jesuit. Many years now he's been... The only sad thing is in years past when I had a studio, you would come with a bag full of stuff. Of goodies. Yeah. Yeah. Where is that bag now? That bag is being raided by my parents. They like the blinky things. They really do. So they're taking notes. Oh, good. But I did have a pedometer on me and I did 43 miles this year.

[00:02:39] OMG. I thought the bag was going to be at an undisclosed location in Vatican City. That would have been... Robert's famous for wearing sandals. I hope you were wearing better shoes. I had better shoes this year, although there is only one thing in the bag that I absolutely, positively, 100% will not share with anyone. And that is a... I don't know if I can even name it. It's an unreleased product that uses a brand new chipset that gives me a standalone supercomputer data center.

[00:03:09] In your pocket? No, no. Does it come with a nuclear reactor? It's about the size of a book. Oh. But it's 256 gigabytes of memory connected to a next generation AI chip. This is the next thing. I bought the framework desktop with the Strix Halo processor and 128 gigs for running local AIs. So this is the... this is the goal. This is where we're trying to go.

[00:03:33] I have to... before we go any farther though, of course, AI and robotics were the talk of the convention this year. And we'll talk a lot about this. We also have Robert's Casey Kasem style top five picks from CES. We'll start with number five and we'll end with number one later in the show. But before we do anything else, this is my pick from CES. Jennifer, you want to set this clip up?

[00:03:59] So I spent my week at CES tracking down humanoid robots that could do my laundry. I had an inkling that this might be a theme and it turned out it really was. In past years, those robots have not been so great. In fact, one of them I know was actually being run by a human at the home office. Yeah. So there was a... there's been a lot of humanoids in the news this year. It's been a big... well, 2025 was a big year for humanoid robots coming into our homes and... Bipedal, two hands. Exactly. A summit face.

[00:04:29] But most of them have been controlled, as you say, by someone remotely. And the sort of the big thing here is, you know, the hardware looks like it's ready. Like these robots are really impressive looking. The ones I met, quite a few of them could, you know, have really good dexterity. But the issue is the software. And to your point... And they're not autonomous yet. So they are, but not... and on the show floor they weren't because for logistical reasons... Noisy, radio signals are terrible.

[00:04:57] Yeah. They can't kind of create a zone for them. You don't want to damage any humans, that kind of thing. Right. And one... they were... most of them were being controlled by like Xbox remotes from someone like the man behind the curtain. And the one that we're about to meet was actually being held up by carabiners on a big frame before it was... Let's take a look. Yeah. It's like... it's like one of those Steadicams. Yeah. So this guy weighs 170 pounds. So he's hefty. And he's from a company called Xeroth.

[00:05:23] And he's called Jupiter. And he is designed to be a household robot. So... See, this is what scares me is... if these aren't necessary... if they're not... but it's like having a chimpanzee in your house. They have a lot of strength. Yes. And if they're not fully controlled, they could hurt you bad. Well, watch what happened. This is... Jennifer was interviewing the robot, I guess. Jupiter weighs 170 pounds and hurts when it falls on you.

[00:05:52] Which it did! No! I didn't touch it! It fell on you! So I tried to reach... as it came towards me, my instinct was to try and help it, you know, and stop it. And I put my hand out. And oh my God! It's heavy! It really kind of tweaked my wrist. I like slacked my team. I was like, I need to file a workers' comp claim. Oh, you could have.

[00:06:17] It makes you... you're a humanoidist. Because if that was not a humanoid robot, you wouldn't have tried to catch it. That's exactly right. I think you're right. I think you're right. If there were a big metal box falling over you, you'd run. I just jumped. I know. But yeah, it was... it was... and then they all rushed around it and it was... oh yeah, it was very sad. It felt very bad for poor Jupiter in his big moment. You can catch that on Jennifer's many articles on The Verge. That video is also on The Verge's front page.

[00:06:46] And if you want to see the actual event, it was three minutes and 40 seconds in. But yes, this is one reason why they are not going to be on our homes anytime soon. I think the LG version, which we, you know, was also big news, the cloyed with the wheels, is a bit more realistic, except for if you have homes with stairs, that then becomes something of an issue. Oh, yeah.

[00:07:12] But yes, it was a lot of fun meeting all these robots. And I actually walked around. I carried a bottle of laundry detergent the entire show, asking each one if they could open it. Because I'm like, if you're gonna do my laundry... That's kind of critical. Yeah. ...you have to open my laundry bottle and none of them were. None of them could open it. No one was willing to give it to go, sadly. Were you using Tide pods or did you have... No, you see, that's what they all... That's what they said. They want pods. Well, we could just do pods. I'm like, well, I want you to open my laundry bottle.

[00:07:42] What about the downy? What about the downy? You gotta be able to open a bottle. I mean, if it's gonna be a home robot, it's gotta be able to do the pickle jar test, right? Exactly. I mean, that's the thing. It felt like a kind of key... If it can't open a bottle, what is it going to be doing in my home that's... It feels so bad for your family because you bring these home. I know. I showed the video to my kids and I was like... I showed them the SwitchBot one. I'm like, we're probably gonna have that in our home, like, in a few months. They're like, no! No! Mommy, no! A bit terrifying.

[00:08:12] I think the cats are gonna be a little more perturbed than the kids. They're old enough. I don't know. The cats have gotten used to things because we have so many robot vacuums. You still like... Last time you were on, you liked that vacuum cleaner that couldn't get under your bed, but was at least a little smarter than the iRobot. It's dramatic. Yes. Yeah, I still like that. I think it's a great product. Well, let's stick with robots for a little bit. Somebody's gotta do a cut down of robots falling over because there were multiple occasions,

[00:08:40] besides the one that hit you, of robots attempting backflips. And there was one... He did a backflip. He kind of got wobbly, stood back up, but then his hand fell off, which is not good. As it happens. As it happens. Then there's another robot I remember just saw... It just collapsed. Like in a... It was like pick-up sticks. Like not just like... Like your robot fell on its face like a human would. This robot just went... Like a rag doll.

[00:09:09] The one that just came running into the hall and started like punching people and then... No. Like punching in the air. And then I think punched itself in the face and knocked itself out. My colleague caught that one on video. I haven't actually seen the video. TPL. It's probably not good for us to take too much human pleasure in the failings of these robots. Just thinking...

[00:09:31] I was speaking to a vendor in the West Hall who had a robot out and she was telling me that they had turned off the more aggressive auto-balancing features. Because unfortunately when you turn all of that stuff on robots, they'll try to move their limbs to rebalance when they're grossly off balance. And it looks like they're punching. It looks like they're attacking. Oh. So they said as a safety measure near other... near people, they turned those features off.

[00:09:59] I think the leading robot company, at least in the US, there may be some Chinese companies that are ahead of it, is Boston Dynamics. Yeah. And they had Atlas there. Atlas made its debut. But Atlas is not designed for the home. So Atlas is very much designed for factories. Although they've hinted that there may be a home robot in its future. But so we didn't go visit Atlas because he can't do my laundry. But apparently its demo wasn't particularly impressive.

[00:10:27] The reporting on the Verge was, you know, he just kind of walked out there and turned around and walked back and there wasn't a lot going on. Well, he's gonna... They've made a deal with Hyundai. Right. And it's gonna be in the factory down the road from me. So I'm excited to go check it out. Yeah. You can go look at it, do the laundry at the Hyundai factory. Yeah. No, it makes sense because robots have been building cars for years. This is not new, not humanoid robots. Jason, why are we so obsessed? Yeah, why aren't... Yes. I don't get that. Why are we so obsessed with robots? With humanoid. No, with humanoid.

[00:10:57] I know. Because it could be so much more functional if you don't worry about making it a humanoid form factor. Yes. The future of robotics, and I think maybe that's why they're getting a little bit of a rebrand, and CS was part of this, and certainly 2025 was a big part of it, of rebranding robots as physical AI. Yeah. Meaning that they're, you know, physical AI doesn't have to look like a human, even the robot word robot has come to essentially mean humanoid robot to most people.

[00:11:23] And so physical AI means, you know, AI that is embodied in some, you know, way that in the real world that can do a number of things. And I'm going to say something that really impressed me, and it's going to sound maybe a little bit boring, but there was in the Siemens keynote they talked about, and I saw a demo of this in North Hall. They had this PepsiCo robot that really, it was just it, and I'll get to why it's actually revolutionary because it's going to sound dumb.

[00:11:53] It was basically a giant arm that picked up something from a skid, a product, either, you know, drinks or chips or whatever, right? But bags, boxes, cartons of them, and move them from one thing to the other. No big deal, right? That's been happening for a long, long time. Very cool. Or, you know, maybe not that cool. But what it was, was the difference was they now have this digital twin.

[00:12:20] So when you combine AI with world models and physical physics models, what it can do is, you know, a lot of times it would take this robot in the past, you know, somebody would design it, one team would design it, the other team would sort of get it and figure out how to put it in the real world.

[00:12:37] It would mess up things and it would like run into things by accident. And they're like, okay, well, we've got to put the angle higher and all that. Well, with this, with this new model, these, this digital twin model, it's called digital twin composer. This was something that was announced at the show. It can not only help you design a robot or, you know, physical AI of different kinds, but it can help you simulate using the world models.

[00:13:04] It can help you simulate all of the things that it can do. And so with this robot arm, they, they said that when they brought it to CES to do the demo, they had never seen it before. They had not, you know, used it to set up what the demo was going to do, but they simulated on the world model. And so instead of what would have taken two days and two or three days and a bunch of engineers to like, you know, stage it and make sure it worked right.

[00:13:30] And all that took less than two hours because they had already done all of it. They were able to simulate all of it. And so that's going to enable them with this sort of physical AI to deploy things in factories, in hospitals, in all kinds of assembly lines and other things much, much faster and at a much higher scale and for a lot cheaper.

[00:13:54] And so sort of this influx of, of robotics is about to happen now, thanks to the combination of, of, of AI, but not just AI, but these sort of next generation models, these, these world models that are coming in, probably going to be one of the big trends of, of 2026.

[00:14:11] Yeah, that's what the guys I would, the, the interviews I did with the robotics, roboticists was like, these, they can't do what you want now, but very soon using world models, they will just be able to watch you and then do what you do. So like, you just need to show the robot how to do the laundry and it will then just do it. Like they were saying that, that that's the sort of next step. And right now, I mean, switch bot was the other humanoid robot that we got to interact with.

[00:14:39] And they showed me some videos of all the, they have like a huge warehouse in China with tons of little rooms where they've just got the robots doing things like making beds, doing the laundry, making breakfast, like just repeatedly to try and train them to do this. And then the thing that the, um, the one, um, the one row. The one row, yes. The one row. One row. Um, that's the one they say they're going to ship that this year for under $10,000. And that will be in our homes this year.

[00:15:08] Um, but then the Xeroth, um, CEO told me that they train the robots on Tik Tok, which made me very worried. Oh, so the robots will be doing dances while folding your laundry. Very trendy dances. This is a kind of, uh, was a, I don't want to say dead end, but this was the initiative some LLM AI companies took, which is to make. tools that are human-like, right? Like chat. Like chat. That's basically what chat bots are.

[00:15:35] So it's like you're interacting with a human because they think that that's what we want. But it turns out the, at least in my opinion, the most useful AI, whether it's robot or LLMs, isn't emulating humanity, but, but doing specific tasks. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what actually the, my, the end of my video summarizes, like, we don't need a humanoid robot to do everything in our home. What we just need is the current robots we have in our homes to do, to be better at what they do and maybe do a little more.

[00:16:04] So I actually saw a robot vacuum style, like it looks like a robot vacuum, but it had a larger arm. And this was at the dreamy booth and it could open the washing machine, load the clothes, move the clothes into the dryer, and then take the clothes out of the dryer and put it in the basket. And it had little cameras in it so it could actually sort the laundry. So it could take, you know, it could see the whites and the colors. It could even like analyze the washing labels so that it could make sure it puts the delicates on and all the, you know, be able to do.

[00:16:33] So it's a concept robot. So it wasn't like something they kind of announced. It was just like in the corner of their booth. But it was like, this is, this makes more sense to me. And in theory, it could roam around the house and pick up clothes for you too. But yeah, like you don't, the idea, and we spoke to the CEO of Roborock as well, who's the robot vacuum manufacturer. And he's, he made the same point. He said, we're going to make the robots that we have in the homes better at what they do. So they're very, very good.

[00:17:04] And then maybe give them some additional capabilities. But so you'll maybe have two or three robots in your home doing your chores, but not just not one robot emulating you. Yeah.

[00:17:17] Although what LG's Cloyd demonstrated, which is what I think is much more realistic and actually very much to your point, Jason, about being able to create, you know, personalize AI, bring AI into your home, is it could create, it could connect to all your smart home appliances and control them. So it doesn't need to open the washing machine. It can just tell the washing machine to open because it's a smart home hub.

[00:17:45] It doesn't need to push the button to make the dishwasher run. It just turns the dishwasher on using smart home connectivity. Same thing with the oven, you know, so it can control all the appliances. And so it's sort of orchestrating them for you, just like your smart home hub is. And then it fills in the gaps that the robots can't do themselves, which is perhaps like putting the croissant in the oven or taking the laundry out of the laundry machine.

[00:18:12] Jennifer, did you see the one that goes up, the take itself up or down the stairs? Yes. The robot rover. Did it work? I think that was my pick of my robot pick of CES. I was like, this, we finally did it. A robot vacuum that can not only climb stairs, but it can clean them too. Yes, because everybody's got perfectly clean floors, but their stairs are disgusting. The stairs are a mess. The stairs are a mess. Yeah.

[00:18:42] So it can, I watched it. It's kind of cute. It's got like little lever legs. It's like a little frog. Just little leaves. Just to get like over a transition between a room, because that's one of the challenges robots vacuums have in your home. They get stuck, you know, on high transitions or big, thick legs of chairs.

[00:19:09] So yeah, this, the Roborock Saros Rover, it's a concept, but they say it will be coming to market. It'll come. And it goes up. It's quite slow, but not really slow. Not as slow as the laundry folding robot, but it climbs up the stair and then it lifts one leg up and pivots and then vacuums along the stair and then brings its other leg up, climbs up to the next step. And it kind of, it teeters on its wheels a little bit. A couple of times I was thinking, oh, it's just going to go right back. It's going.

[00:19:39] Yeah. But they say it has, the engine has like built in like braking and, you know, so it can figure out where it is and not go backwards. Keeps going up. They didn't show it climbing down the stairs. They just showed it going down a slope. Going up. But they did, before CES, they did show us a demo video and briefings that did show it going downstairs as well as up. And it can also like lift one leg up and sort of clean along things.

[00:20:06] So I think the idea there is that maybe it could like clean other surfaces, not just steps, but any kind of surface that's maybe, you know, like maybe even a table. Not that I don't know if you'd want your robot vacuum to clean your table, but, you know, it could get into different areas. Because, and this is Roborock president's point about making the robots that we have do more and do better rather than do everything. Which I think, I definitely think is the way we're going with home robotics.

[00:20:33] I was just imagining, you know, I think it was really good to have. And eventually I'm sure these things are going to get good. They'll climb the stairs. They'll, you know, scale the stairs. They'll do all of the clean. They'll suck your face. Like the half life face suckers leaping into you. That too. All of it. But, but I, I was just imagining having one of these and then you're like, you hear thump, thump, thump, thump. What was that? Oh, it was the $2,000 robot just fell down the stairs. Yes.

[00:21:01] No, that's, well, that has been a problem with robot vacuums from the beginning. It's true. It's very, very true. There's going to be things like that for a long time where we have little accidents happen. I mean, personally, I would, I would want robotics. I would want two robotic arms mounted to the ceiling in my dining room slash kitchen because they'll help with chores. I'd probably want an arm or two in the laundry room. But other than that, I don't really need a robot following me around the house.

[00:21:31] Those are the two places that are going to have the most use for any sort of robotic help. And those are the places where you can really easily define the tasks that need to take place. And I think fixed arms work so much better than trying to make it work with a robot that follows a humanoid or not. You know, Roborock is one of a number of Chinese companies that basically put, Roomba's out of business, right? I mean, are the Chinese lapping us on all of this? Yes.

[00:22:01] Yeah. Dreamy and Roborock. Dreamy. Everything you've talked about. Their booth, Dreamy, so Dreamy came out in 2020, I think they launched their first robot vacuums in the US. And they are now, so they had their first booth at CES maybe two years ago, and it was quite small. But like robot vacuum booth next to Roborock. Now they had two booths, one in the Venetian, one in the LVCC. And when I went, I went there to interview the president and the PR guy said to me,

[00:22:30] Oh, we just signed the contract for our booth next year. We're going to have the largest booth in the history of CES. Oh my God. Wow. Not our largest booth, but like the largest. Ever. And they're been some pretty big booths. Samsung and LG have whole city blocks. They had a car. They had appliances. They had smartphones. This is Dreamy. They had smart home appliances, smart home devices. They had a whole like Dyson rip off room with all the hair dryers. Like they had everything.

[00:22:59] They're not just doing, robots are their main thing, but they have become a huge multi-appliance, kind of like robotics and household appliances, like Shark Ninja and Rumba together, plus, you know, Whirlpool. And then cars. They're just going crazy. And I heard there was a really interesting article in the South China Morning Post. Am I saying that right? Just before Christmas saying that, and this is unconfirmed,

[00:23:24] but the Dreamy CEO had sent out an email to all employees and was giving everyone an ounce of gold as a bonus. Oh my God. Geez. What is that? 5,000 bucks or something. Wow. Back to the heyday of CEOs. They have a lot of money. They're doing very well. Their first. Go ahead. Sorry, Leo. I'm just, I shouldn't bring politics into this, but we've banned Chinese EVs because they're so much better than our EVs.

[00:23:50] We've just banned all drones made outside of the US because we don't like it that their drones are so much better than ours. I am this, this, this feels like you're putting a big target on your back when you say we're going to have the largest booth in the history of CES. I don't, there's nothing to say about it. I don't, you know.

[00:24:11] You know, two years ago, I remember the first, when I was, I was still at ZDNet and we reviewed the first Dreamy, I think it was like, it was their first big product. It was like the Dreamy 40, maybe. Yeah. The L40. Yeah. Thank you. And the crazy thing was, it had really just come to the point where Roborock had just taken over from Roomba as like, they were clearly now the best, you know, they had the best products.

[00:24:38] They, they had the best pickup, the best sort of battery life, the best, you know, navigation, all of it. And it was like, wow, Roborock is, is the, you know, 800 pound gorilla. And Dreamy came out with their first product and it was better than, than Roborocks. And it's like, ever since then, Roborock has just been, you know, scrambling to try to catch up and Dreamy. I was so impressed that how did they come out with their first product? Clearly they just looked at what all they were doing and they're like, oh, there's a couple of things that could be better and we'll just make those better.

[00:25:08] And, and it was better at almost everything, you know, with its first gen product. Is there a security or privacy concern with this? I mean, these, these are autonomous devices in your house. Map your house. They have cameras. Yes. But the same sort of security issue you're going to have with having Amazon appliances everywhere. I mean, any, any sort of autonomous vehicle in the, in your home is going to have a map of your home. It that's, that's how it moves around. Right. It's going to generate that.

[00:25:36] And a lot of that processing does not happen on the device. It's going to happen to the server that it's connected to on the other side of the cloud. So is there a security issue? Absolutely. What could you do with that information? I mean, you could do nefarious things, but people would have to really target you to do it. So it makes more sense, frankly, for Amazon to look and see what furniture you have so they can show you the right ads. Yeah. And then for the Chinese to look and see what furniture you have so they can invade our shores. I don't know. I don't know what.

[00:26:06] I mean, they, and this is why the Matic we mentioned earlier is one that I really like, because it does all its processing locally. You don't need a cloud. There's no, I like that. Wired. Honestly. And if that's something you're concerned about, yes, I, you know, Chinese manufacturers is, is there are. So Ecovacs had a pretty bad incident recently, which is another Chinese robot vacuum manufacturer where their robot vacuums got hacked and they were like chasing people around and yelling at them in their houses, which is obviously terrifying.

[00:26:33] And then there are like user metrics you can put on the robot so you can disable the camera. There are, Roborock actually came out with a whole line without cameras. So if you, you know, you can still use the vacuums without having a camera in your home. Um, they have like a pin in order to enable the camera and the camera, all of them when they are recording, cause you can use them to like check in on your home and dreamies. One of dreamies features is an owl, which is another one.

[00:27:01] There's a lot of them, um, is that they can go find your pet for you. So if you're out of the house and you want to check on your pet, the robot can go and look for the pet for you. But the robot will say as it's moving and recording live view enabled live view enabled, like so that there are lots of safeguards, I suppose. But ultimately, yeah, anything connected to the internet, you are going to have security risks.

[00:27:25] But now with matter, um, there you, you have got the capability of using some of these devices just with a local platform. Um, you obviously lose some of the capabilities, um, because if you, so you could connect, I think dreamy and robot rock both work with matter. So you could just set up the robot via apple home. Um, although if you want the mapping features, you do need to use the dreamy app.

[00:27:49] So yeah, there's, there's still a little ways to go until we can get, you know, local control of some of these devices. Um, but I think that's the way we're going to see some companies coming out to sort of differentiate themselves. Cause there obviously are concerns around that. I do think the dreamy halo hairdryer, which is great. The verge did give an award to why isn't that you there though? I don't, there is a video of me. I used it because this wasn't plugged in. This was an unveil. It was just sitting there.

[00:28:19] But so I went to the dreamy booth and got my hair dried by it. It was for people who don't aren't seeing the video. This is a thing that is as tall as a human almost. I mean, it's, it's a big arc that sits on the floor half circle. Yeah. Yeah. Does air come out of the whole thing? No, just the top. Yeah. So no, it's the top. So you can, this is a back to the stand hair dryer that we got rid of in the sixties. It looks like that's like the Dyson hair dryer. Lots of young people. And I didn't want to say, yeah, but this is it.

[00:28:48] Remember you used to go to the salon and you'd sit under the hood with all the other. Guys in curlers. And this is like that. It does. It reminded me of that a lot. It's got it. So it uses AI to try. Oh, well, like movement. So in theory, the, they told me, What does it track your hair? You should be able to just move. Moisture. It tracks your head. So you can move and it follows your head. And also it moves around your head. Yeah. I'm going to drop the link of me.

[00:29:16] Does it, does it, so it's rotating. Oh my God. Yes. So it's moving for you. So instead of having, having to hold a blow dryer, which gosh knows is really an onerous task. And you don't have to go to a hairdresser to do it for you. You can have the dreamy halo dry your hair. Yes. And it also shoots. I need to pitch to DEFCON this year that we're going to create a village with nothing but these smart appliances and just let hackers go crazy.

[00:29:45] You can see all the ways you could hurt a human inside this little village. No, it does have, it's a lamp. So the whole. Of course it is. Cause why not? And then it also, it shoots like moisturizing air. So it's supposed to like be a scalp treatment for you. Does it do sense? I put it just at the end of the, the run. Yeah. I see it on your Instagram. Will it sport like essential oils? Yes. Like that kind of thing. It's meant to make you feel like healthy.

[00:30:16] There's me. And you went in with your hair wet. No, you didn't. All right. And it also was just kind of, so you could see it moving a little bit. It's like move. Cause you, as you dry your own hair, you move. You move it. Yeah. You don't want a big hot spot at the top of your head. Yeah. So it's moving for you. And then it's just an air fryer. That's different. It was, it was, they said it's going to be less $700. They say it's not available yet, but. No.

[00:30:44] But they showed the video of it, of like you sitting on a couch and it just kind of. Jennifer, you're such a trooper. I can't believe you had to go around all of these different things. I mean, we're making fun of it, but it looks nice. Yeah, it does. It's furniture. You could have it. It could be in your living room. The lamp thing. Yeah. Oh, that lamp. That's my hair dryer too. Yeah. I need to let the lamp. Hold on a second. I'll be right there. I'm going to let the lamp dry my hair. I could see buying this for my wife just as a gift.

[00:31:14] Just, just for us. I mean, it'd be a fun Christmas gift. Yeah. And then my mom would use it to dry the kitchen. Right. Mom, why is it dreamy in the kitchen? It's drying all the rags. It's drying all the stuff. Well, I do want to talk about the computer in your pocket, Father Robert. We'll get to that. There's so much to talk about chips. This was an interesting, it sounds like a very interesting CES. It wasn't dull. Yeah, not dull. There was a lot. There was a lot.

[00:31:45] There was a lot. And it was just a good word from the Vatican, the digital Jesuit. Now, Father Robert has put together a countdown, a Casey Kasem-style countdown, of your top five gizmos from CES. And we're going to do it as Casey Kasem does backwards.

[00:32:10] So now, starting our top five countdown of CES hits, here's number five from the show floor. Hit it. CES, what we used to call the Consumer Electronics Show. It's the mecca for industry professionals, engineers, and those who are just interested in the latest and greatest in technology.

[00:32:32] Now, with millions of square feet of exhibit halls and thousands of vendors, it can be difficult to zero in on the technology that you're looking for, which is why I did the hard work for you. I'm Father Robert Balassir, the digital Jesuit, and this is Padres Top 5 from CES 2026. Number five, the Strut EV. Not everybody who needs a mobility device can safely operate a mobility device. I love this thing, Leo.

[00:33:01] That's the basic problem that led Singapore-based robotics company Strut to create the EV. To address that problem, Strut gave their EV a suite of sensors and processing that they call their EVSense system. It uses a combination of cameras, LiDAR, time of flight, and ultrasonic sensors to give the system a 360 by 360 degree view of the environment around the EV. This allows the EV to not only see, understand, and avoid people, hazards, and obstacles, but also to autonomously bring its users safely to their destinations.

[00:33:30] I want this when I go into the hole. Combined with a four-motor active drive motion and suspension system that will dynamically adjust torque and prevent slippage, the EV works well on carpet, gravel, concrete, wet surfaces, and the like. It tops out at seven miles per hour, has a max payload of 350 pounds, can climb grades of 13 degrees, and has an all-day replaceable cartridge battery that can charge from 20 to 80% capacity in 30 minutes.

[00:33:52] In co-pilot mode, the EVSense system smooths user inputs to prevent jerky motions and applies proactive braking to prevent collisions or driving into unsafe areas in three axes. In co-pilot plus mode, move the joystick where you want to go, and the EVSense will automatically adjust the heading to get you there while going around any obstacles. Basically, it's drive-by-point. So I'm not driving it right now. I'm hungry! Oh, it's just... In Pathfinder and Wave, the EV drops into full autonomous operation. All right, I need it now.

[00:34:21] Users can either use a map to point out where they want to go, or they can use the context-sensitive voice assistant. For example, say, I'm hungry, and the EV will safely find you to the kitchen. At $5,300 launch price and the eventual $7,500 MSRP, the Strut EV is well below the average price for an advanced wheelchair. It could be the perfect tech for those who need a little help getting around. That's very cool. Now, we're going to take all of these and put them together.

[00:34:49] There's a seven-minute feature we'll put up on our YouTube channel, on our Twit News YouTube feed, so you can see all of them. But that was number five in Father Robert's Hit Parade, and we will get to the rest. I was so enamored because I've been looking at nice wheelchairs for my father because he's having trouble moving around. But the problem is... $7,500 bucks is a good price? It's actually... It's $5,300 right now. It'll go up to $7,500. Oh, okay. Well, $53,000.

[00:35:17] But $15,000 is what I was looking at for a standard electronic motorized wheelchair. Oh, that's crazy. The problem with that is if you can't drive it, if you don't... If you no longer have the ability to drive, you'll be driving into walls and into people. This will not let you drive into an obstacle. Oh, that's fantastic. Wow. The only thing that's missing, I'll be honest with you, it needs a scissor lift. So you can say up, and it goes up. Wow. That's all it needs. It just needs that. And then, done deal. If I could sit... Practical tech. Yeah.

[00:35:47] If I could sit at the bottom of the stairs and it would just push me up the stairs. Now, Leo, one of the other things that I was thinking of is we have a retirement home for Jesuit priests in Los Gatos, California. And we had to ban scooters, mobility scooters, because the guys were running into each other. Yeah. They were jousting. Not jousting, but when you live with someone for 60 years, you develop a lot of grudges. Oh, they were intentionally running into each other? I think so. I think so.

[00:36:16] Ramming each other? Wow. All right. We'll have more. They were accidentally running over people's feet. It was weird. We'll have more in our Top 5 Countdown with Father Robert, Jennifer Pasatui, and Jason Heiner. Our show today brought to you by Redis, brand new sponsor, but not new to us, because we've been using Redis for our website for 10 years at least. Redis is R-E-D-I-S, and I think if you're a geek, you know the name, is the real-time data platform that powers ultra-fast applications.

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[00:38:15] Learn more. Or try Redis Cloud for free. Just search for Redis Cloud, or you can go to their website, redis.io. R-E-D-I-S dot I-O. Thank you, Redis, for years of making our website ultra-reliable and for sponsoring this week in tech. So glad to have you in the Twit family. All right. What is in your pocket, Robert? You got a supercomputer in your pocket? Really? I've got a supercomputer. I can't.

[00:38:45] It's got a whole bunch of NDAs attached to it. But let's just say it comes from the largest maker of AI chips in the world. We know who that is. Okay. We know who that is. It's their next generation. Do you have Vera Rubin in your pocket? Possibly. Possibly. She's happy to see you. It's in the format of their Spark. So if you've seen their Spark, it is basically a mini data center in a box. This is using the newest of the processors, the two-part. That you can't mention. I understand.

[00:39:14] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Now, the nice thing about it is we're going to be using it mostly for video creation. And you can do everything local. You don't even have to remotely touch cloud resources to be able to do it. And I can put together a 4K video lasting about 30 seconds in about 90 seconds. I mean, the turn is so fast. It iterates so quickly. It's amazing. Does it run normal software? It's not running Windows. No, no, no, no, no, no. This is all Linux.

[00:39:43] So it's a standalone server that you can basically send prompts to. You can send prompts and it will continue to iterate. You can also load up your own LLMs. So you can have multiple processes going at once? Exactly, exactly. So we've got this box. Ostensibly, it's for video. But also, where I work, my day job, we're in a place where we often have these conferences that have conversations that we call them internal forum, which means it cannot leave that room. It's not secret. It's just sensitive information.

[00:40:13] We cannot use any of the current popular translation services because they all require us to send those conversations away. That's a no-go. So we're going to be trying to host our own small AI data centers that do nothing but real-time translation. That's where this thing really comes in. It's where it's really going to shine. So I like this. It's a nice trend of taking just enough compute power and putting it into your local network,

[00:40:41] your local campus, so that you can do everything in-house. I'm a big, big proponent of that. Well, I am, yeah. I mean, honestly, I was talking before the show. Maybe we'll talk a little bit after the show. We'll certainly talk more about it on other shows like Intelligent Machines. But I am head over heels in love with Claude Code, or Claude, as French friends could it, Claude Code. And, in fact, I just ended up this morning paying for the max version, the $250 a month max version,

[00:41:10] because I'm so blown away by what it can do. But ideally, that's a lot of money. Ideally, I have a lot of hardware here. I could run this stuff locally for privacy reasons, for security reasons, for cost reasons. I would love something like Claude to run my household. So I could see some real applications for this. Now, this imaginary company that you can't mention the name of, do they envision it as a commercial-only product, or do they see a home used for it at some point?

[00:41:40] I mean, it's going to be commercial-only, but it will leak its way into enterprise. It's never going to make it into home, not in its current configuration, just because even though it's far more efficient, it's still kind of power-and-water-hungry. So you wouldn't want to do that. What, are you carrying a pump and a reservoir with you in your backpack? How water? It's got to be a sealed system, right?

[00:42:07] Yeah, to be able to get decent throughput on this thing for an enterprise, you would need to water cool them. In fact, we'll see that later on in one of the segments, but the blades, the data center that NVIDIA set up in their suite in the Fontainebleau, it's amazing how much they have to put cooling into the development of the solutions. It's no longer an afterthought. They have to have that up front because these things are putting out so much thermal energy

[00:42:34] that if you're not thinking about that from the get-go, it's just not going to work. Jensen did do quite a fun speech, talked a lot about all the new things. I'm not saying that this is an NVIDIA product, but I'm segueing now to NVIDIA. Sorry. Although Jeff Jarvis said he really wanted to interview Jensen's leather jacket. He's very impressed by it. I mean, the leather jacket, the black leather jacket is the new-

[00:43:03] The new black turtleneck. It's the new black turtleneck. Yeah. For sure. I tweeted that- This one looked like alligator or something. He pulls it off, though. He kind of does, right? Greg Brockman came on, the president of OpenAI, came on the AMD keynote, and when he came on, he came on in a black leather jacket, and I tweeted out, this is my most popular tweet of the whole show. I was like, breaking news.

[00:43:30] Greg Brockman has arrived at the AMD keynote in a black leather jacket. This is serious. And that was by far my most interacted with tweet of the entire show. That's hysterical. Well, maybe it's the new look for the new billionaires. So we'll get to AMD in a second. NVIDIA announced a new platform called Vera Rubin. Yes. I presume she is a computer scientist? Space, yeah, scientist. Space scientist. Okay.

[00:44:00] This is, this is, does this replace Blackwell, or is this- It does. This is the next generation. Grace, Blackwell, Vera, Rubin. So it's Vera, Rubin. Here's the CPU. Rubin is the GPU. So there's a Blackwell in the Rubin? No, no, no. It's a brand new chip, brand new piece of silicon. It uses NVLink 6, so it's double the bandwidth to each GPU. And two GPUs, two Rubin GPUs are paired with each Vera CPU on the same piece of silicon. The Rubin is the GPU.

[00:44:30] It's like a sandwich. And the Vera is the CPU. He said there's like six chips. This makes up essentially six chips. One of them is Vera, one of them is Rubin, and then there's four others. Wow. The interlink and all that. But the thing- She's an astronomer. She is. Who reshaped how scientists understand the property of galaxies. Yes. Very cool. There's the Rubin GPU, the Vera CPU, both built on TSMC's three nanometer process.

[00:44:58] But it's the bandwidth, it's the interconnect that is, I think, very important. It's amazing. You know, they were already- Yeah. They were already had a huge lead, right, in AI chips. Like, this is no secret. They have 90% market share. They have- If they stopped taking orders today, they have everything that they're going to make in 2026 is already sold, right?

[00:45:23] So they have so much demand, and that's why they're, you know, essentially been printing money for three years. And even with that, you know, there are competitors trying. So Tranium from Amazon, you have Google with their TPUs. You have AMD, of course, trying to also grab a piece of the market. You know, the next biggest, according to AMD, according to most places, to NVIDIA at 90% is

[00:45:52] AMD with 5%. And yet, their next generation chip, this Vera Rubin chip, we weren't expecting for about another six months. So this is kind of about six months ahead of schedule. Well, it won't be out till later this year, though. That's right. It won't be. But we expected them to kind of announce the full details of it, you know, probably mid-year. So one of the things that comes up for me is we see these companies, you know, XAI, Elon

[00:46:16] Musk's company, and Meta, of course, and Microsoft, spending billions of dollars building these data centers with the latest chips that are now obsolete. It's worse than that, Leo, because we know for a fact, because of the power consumption of the Blackwell chips, that there's a very large percentage of the Blackwell chips sold that are not powered on. They can't power them on. So they bought them because- They had an overheating problem when they first came out. Exactly, exactly.

[00:46:45] So you've got a huge chunk that are doing nothing except waiting for more data center capacity. Well, if you look at how much more energy efficient the Vera Rubin is going to be over the Grace Blackwell, it actually makes economic sense to just no longer use the Blackwell chips that you've got in reserve. Oh my God. And just buy all brand new Vera Rubin chips. Now, this is for the, especially for the folks who are on the leading edge of like training.

[00:47:12] Yeah, you can send those Blackwell chips to us. You'll take them. You'll take them. We'll take them. eBay. Put them on eBay. You know what? We will sell those and they'll do great. That's not fully ingested at some point, right? It might be a couple of years off. This is the thing that I find most interesting. Again, Cloud Code is so good, but it's running off of Anthropix servers trained with very, very expensive hardware, probably being sold at a loss by Anthropix. But this stuff trickles down. Yes, it does. Right?

[00:47:41] Is it reasonable to think that in six months or a year, or even if it's two years, I will have that kind of capability sitting on my desk here? Very reasonable. Desk. I mean, the problem is they sell them in blades. So they're completely... All right. I'll have a server closet. Okay. Well, I mean... No. How big is your server closet and does it have three-phase power? But you've got something in your pocket that can do that. Yes.

[00:48:10] So that's a very special use case. So instead of putting it into a blade, they put it into an individual case. Well, it's not tied then to the blade. You could do it in different ways, right? I guess. I don't have to start poking around. I think there'd be more of a market for that than there would be for a robot. And it... I mean, look, maybe those robots are going to cost thousands, maybe $10,000, right? If for... 90,000. 90? That's what one of the Jupiter, he said it would be $90,000.

[00:48:41] Who's going to buy that? That's got to be a kind of limited market. There are a lot of people who are going to pay a lot of money to have robots fall on them. That's all I'm saying. It'll be like a car event, right? It'll be like a car. And will you need it as much as you need a car? I mean, Optimus, they talked about that, that essentially the price will be similar to a car with Tesla, you know, Optimus. But, you know, the thing with... To your point, Leo, though, the chips, the thing is, is these high-end chips are going to be...

[00:49:10] You know, essentially they do the same thing for training with a quarter of the number of GPUs, which is incredible. For inference, I believe, and Father Robert can gut check me on this. Inference is 10X. Inference is 10X. Exactly. So 10X for inference, 4X for training, that's going to let you do so much more with the same amount of chips. Now, one of the counter trends that's happening right now... Before you go on, I got to...

[00:49:40] Because I need to know these terms. So when you create an LLM, you train it. And that's the... That's training. That's the first expense. Is that the most CPU or GPU intensive part of the process? It depends what kind of model you're making. Okay. Okay. But if you're building... Yeah. If you're building ChatGPT 5.2 or Anthropics Opus 4.5, that's the inference part. That's going to be a big expense.

[00:50:08] Then you do a lot of post-training and reinforcement learning and stuff. What's the inference? Is that when I'm using it? That's right. So every time you ask something of an LLM, it's generating an inference token. That's its response. That's the user cost. And is the user cost higher than the training cost? It's not now, but it will be. Remember, only 13% of the world, people in the world have actually used generative AI to this point.

[00:50:33] Which is surprising because OpenAI says 800 million people use ChatGPT every month. Well, sorry. Only 13% use it on a monthly basis. Ah, okay. Have used it once maybe. I must be in the top 10th of 1% because I'm using it all. All day, every day. I'm using it right now. There is one more spec that's important for the conversation, and that is per watt, per watt of power used.

[00:51:01] Vera Rubin does eight times the work of Grace Blackwell. So it is far more power efficient, which again, that's why if you're sitting on a lot of Blackwell product right now, just waiting to be powered up, you would be looking at it and going, you know what? In a year, the Vera Rubin is going to be cheaper because the power costs are so much less. And somebody in the Flow Connects pointing out in the chat room, remember, the $6 million man was $6 million. So $90,000 is a deal. That's it.

[00:51:30] The counter trend, though, is that- We have the technology. Go ahead. We're going to see that because it's so expensive to run AI, right? There's this real ROI problem for businesses. And so what we're seeing is small language models, SLMs, and domain-specific language models. There's a real move to using them and optimizing them.

[00:51:56] I did a story in December on this company, Neurometric AI, that their whole thing is they're going to help you find the way to optimize your workload to a specific model. And it'll be up to a tenth of the cost and higher performance. And you can use older hardware. You can use Blackwell. You could use hardware two or three generations old. So it's not like Blackwell people are going to throw them in the trash or something. They're still going to use them.

[00:52:25] They're still going to use them for smaller things where they don't need them as much. In fact, this argues for less focus on these kind of generalized chat bots and more specific stuff. A medical AI, for instance, that would help a doctor with diagnostics. It could be a smaller model, run much more inexpensively, and really, frankly, be more useful and accurate because it just does that. Yes.

[00:52:49] That makes a lot of sense in the context of where we're talking about this general purpose robot versus purpose build robots. It makes more sense. Not that people want a dozen robots running around the house all the time. Well, the sustainability question really has to be part of a regular conversation. Yeah. It's terrible. You've got Elon Musk who's going to be spinning up a new two gigawatt data center.

[00:53:13] And remember, you lose about 1.8 gallons of water to evaporation for every ton hour of cooling. That means for his two gigawatt data center, he's going to be losing about 79 million gallons of water a year out of that municipal water source. Did you just do that math in your head? He's very good that way. He's like a little AI himself. I mean, look, golf courses probably lose that much as well. I mean, we have to decide what we want to spend our water budget on.

[00:53:41] But evaporate doesn't mean it goes away forever. It comes back down. But they are pulling from municipal water sources. So that's a problem. The Meta data center in Arizona, it's already pulling from a place that has very little water. Right. I don't know why they're building these data centers in water-deprived areas. Well, tax breaks, I guess. Meta is building one in Louisiana that's essentially the size of Manhattan and Hyperion. It's two gigawatts.

[00:54:10] And it's going to scale up to five gigawatts and essentially the size of Manhattan. But the interesting thing, I did wonder this because Louisiana is essentially a swamp. So I thought, well, the water is to get a hold of. Suck it out of the bayou. There's also power. And unfortunately, at least some of Elon's plants are running on natural gas, which is a horrible polluting form of energy. Although what is interesting is all of this puts pressure, purely economic, not necessarily environmental,

[00:54:38] but it has the same impact on these companies to become more efficient, to go to nuclear power and renewable power, to use less energy, to use less water. And they seem to be doing that. Yeah. On Friday, Meta just- They got it. In Clark County. Meta just became, sorry about it. I'll just say, Meta became the number one buyer of nuclear power in the U.S. on Friday. Yeah. They signed a huge, huge deal. Like five more plants or something. Yeah.

[00:55:07] Or you could do it the way that they're doing it here in Nevada, which is there's three data centers that are going in, and they all have an agreement with Nevada Power that the cost of building the new plants, at least two to three new plants at a price of $1.2 to $2 billion a pop, are going to be paid by the rate payers. Oh, that's good. That's fantastic. Oh, yeah. What could possibly go wrong there? Jeez. Yeah.

[00:55:32] Well, there's some warring parties at all of this. But I think, at least for now, the world has said we want AI, whatever the cost. So AMD, Lisa Sue, they have new- They've replaced or not replaced, but they're going to have a successor to the Strix Halo, right? And new Zen 5 APUs. AMD's- Is AMD lapping Intel in this?

[00:56:03] I mean- Not lapping. They lapped Intel. Yeah. Done. Done deal. Intel's in the dust. Although Intel's new processors are actually surprisingly good. But when it comes to AI, AMD is the leader here. They're not as AI-optimized as AMD's new chips. AMD and AMD Silicon has- They have a lot of headroom. So if they really wanted to push, they could push Intel out of existence. But that's not- What about Qualcomm?

[00:56:31] And its chipset, the Snapdragon. Is it competitive? I mean, ARM, you've played with ARM chips. Some of them are competitive. Most of them are not. Right. The Strix Halo I have over here on my framework is great. I have an Apple Mac Mini. And Apple's done some pretty amazing things. And they have NPUs and they have unified memory. And so they have some hardware that's pretty good for AI, right? Nothing like the Vera Rubin.

[00:57:01] It all comes down to where Qualcomm is finding its profit center. Its profit center is not in super powerful, intelligent devices. It's in all devices. Right. And so that's where they're spending their R&D. Well, you know what else is getting smart? Legos. Yeah. This was my favorite thing. I didn't put it in my top five, but I loved this. This was our best in show by far. No one disputed it at all. Tell us about it, GPT. This is a smart brick.

[00:57:29] So sadly, I didn't get to see it myself, but I heard everyone raving about it. Because it actually wasn't on the show floor. It was one of those, like, you have to go have a invitation booth thing. Gotta go to the hotel. But Sean Hollister, who is our unofficial Lego correspondent, just had a blast. And there's a great video of him playing with the toys. But basically, it just makes Legos come to life. So each brick, so there's special, these special bricks come in the set.

[00:57:58] There's, I think, three sets that are launching in March. And they have Bluetooth. So it works on a little Bluetooth mesh, like a local Bluetooth mesh to communicate. They have NFC chips. And then what happens is when you put it in, say, you put one brick in with Luke Skywalker and R2-D2 in a little, in one of their jets, planes, spaceships. And it knows which character is in there.

[00:58:27] And it can talk and respond like the character, making noises, like R2-D2 noises. And they can connect to each other. So there was one demo I saw where Luke's, Darth Vader was talking to Princess Leia. And they were kind of communicating in a different language. So it's like everything that you did as a kid to make the toys talk to each other, but it actually doesn't fall in half. Oh, now you don't have to do that anymore. Aww. It is exceptionally stupid. It is a waste of time. And I want them so much.

[00:58:56] So fun. It's going to sell to adults, obviously. There's an X-Wing. And then there's the Emperor's Throne Room. You need all three. Yes. So it's not AI. We're not talking AI here. These are just... No, they're like, our product has no AI. It's dumber than anything you have seen at the show. And it's also the coolest thing that you've... It can measure distance and orientation. So it has accelerometers in it. So it's more than just NFC talking. Yeah. It knows. It lights up. It makes noises. And you fly it around.

[00:59:26] Yeah, it whooshes. It lights up and makes Star Wars noises, which is like... But how, you know, the next generation is not going to know. They don't know how to go pew, pew, pew, pew. It's going to... Toys are going to do it for the... The next generation can do their own thing. This is for us. They only work for 45 minutes, like battery life. It doesn't take AAA batteries. No, it has a little... It comes with a little charger thing. You pop the bricks on the charger. So you get 45 minutes of playtime

[00:59:56] before they have to be charged again. And yeah, I mean, it is... We saw a lot of AI in toys at CES, which is not a good thing. No, in fact... Not a good thing. There's our own Senator Alex Padilla has introduced a bill in the Senate, U.S. Senate, banning AI in toys for kids. Yeah. And this is just a way of taking, you know, technology, taking the experience of playing with your toys to that next level, that level you always wanted

[01:00:25] when you were playing with them as a kid. And I don't think... I mean, I'm sure there's some naysayers saying, well, yeah, but aren't you just destroying your own imagination? You can't use your own imagination, don't have the toys do it for you. But you still are playing with them. You are still creating an experience with the toys. It's just more augmented and with more fun and more engaging. So hopefully maybe keep kids away from engaging things online and playing with engaging things in real life. It feels like a win-win here, really.

[01:00:54] I think that last point... I think that last point is the most important one because I had plenty of toys where, and my kids had plenty of toys where, you had the button that made the noise of the ship, you know, and it didn't mean you didn't make noises, other noises, right? Yeah. But it was more engaging and it becomes... It can compete a little bit better in some cases with some of the digital, you know, stuff. You put Palpatine on his chair and he... There it does. It plays. Exactly.

[01:01:24] The Death March. This is Sean's... This is adult me. And adult me can afford all the toys that child me couldn't get. So, yeah. That's who's going to buy this. You know what I love about this is Lego lost the patent. You know, it expired for its bricks. So anybody can make Lego bricks now. But they are innovating in ways that preserves... I mean, I'm sure this is patented, that preserves their advantage. That's good. I'd like to see that. That's nice. Yeah. You know, the AI toys...

[01:01:53] We talked a little bit about this on Thursday, on Wednesday. Yeah. And Intelligent Machines as well. But this was one of those that felt like all of a sudden... It's not like there hadn't been them... There hadn't been AI toys before at CES. But wow, the sort of like emotional support toy, you know, thing was really disturbing. Tell us about that. You mentioned that on Wednesday, but a lot of people didn't see it. There are emotional support toys?

[01:02:22] Multiple ones. And yeah, there's this one that was like essentially a sock with an eye that like follows you around the... It is as silly as it sounds. It follows you around the room. It tries to learn what makes you laugh, what makes you smile. And I loved it that what... You know, we wrote about these very skeptically and said like, look, putting all of these toys out in the world that are aimed at helping, you know, be emotionally supportive for your kids because they're trying to help solve loneliness and isolation and that kind of thing. And we sort of questioned like

[01:02:52] doing all this before thinking through all the implications feels like it's pretty dangerous. And our audience responded 50% immediately. And this was an AI audience, right? That said, no, they wouldn't want this. And then only 25% said yes. And then the other 25 were sort of like, we're, you know, still trying to decide. And one reader wrote in so coherently and said, you know, isn't the promise of AI that it should do more things for you and you can spend more time with your kids,

[01:03:21] not that you should, you know, buy emotional support toy for them. And, you know, how does this help? Let's face it. Most parents are looking for ways to spend less time for their kids. Let's be honest, right? I think the emotional support toys are also for the adults though. Like we saw... Well, this is for old people. This one and Anne from the Mind with Heart Robotics is for elderly people who, you know, not only do parents not want to spend time with their kids, they don't want to spend time with their parents. There was one we saw called Little Milo

[01:03:49] that actually was picked as our best, most irrationally loved product at CES because it was so cute. And it was designed for people who can't have pets but would like to have a dog. And it's a little... It was a tiny bit creepy. And a lot of the comments on the article were like, well, this is... I mean, it's made by a robot vacuum manufacturer from China. So just a little... Oh, those. Yeah, the little Milo. But he was so cute. What's he look like?

[01:04:19] He is a dog. It looks just like a dog. And remember the dogs from like the 80s that everyone bought? Like Ibo? Sony's Ibo? No, no, no, no. Not even as robotic as that. Like it was a dog that could kind of just go... That's all you really need a dog to do. Really? Let's be honest. And move around and wag its tail. And this one can't even move. But the idea behind it is it's supposed to... I mean, it uses AI to kind of develop a personality based on how you interact with it

[01:04:48] and become an emotional support for you. And it's meant for adults. It's not meant for kids. Is this a market you think that's going to take off? It seems... It feels like it. There is... You know, one of the biggest epidemics in the world is loneliness. And we're seeing a lot of companies come out with products to help with things like aging in place or loneliness for elders who are living alone. Not... They can't... You know, it's not because they don't have

[01:05:17] the ability to leave the house, but they're just sort of stuck and lonely. They don't have people visiting them. There's one robot that I've actually been following at CES since 2018 that's very successful in its space called LEQ. And we've actually talked about LEQ on the show before, I think. And they were at CES again this year and they've been using AI to help the robot become much more useful to the person

[01:05:44] because the main point of it initially was conversation. It's one of the only proactive AIs on the market. So it prompts the person it's living with so that it's trying to get them to talk and communicate because if you're an elderly person living alone, you don't speak sometimes for, you know, days because you're not... If you're not talking to people. So this... The idea behind this one is proactive. And with AI, they're now using... They've turned it into more of a health agent that's actually fully monitoring the person

[01:06:14] and looking for any potential issues. Oh, that's different. ...connect with their health providers. So you connect it... You can connect it through the app with your health providers and it can help understand your... Not just your emotional issue... Emotional health, but also physical health. Like she only went to the bathroom... I don't know this because this is maybe a little private. But, you know, it could be something like she only went into the bathroom four times today, maybe. Or she went too many times today and this could be bad. This is something we need to relate to the health agent.

[01:06:44] You know, proactive things to keep monitoring. I think there... But, you know, in terms of having devices like this in your home, when I said this to the LEQ guy, it's like, but isn't it kind of sad that we have to use a robot to do things like this rather than have people helping us? And he's like, yeah. If we could... If there were enough people out there to just spend time with the elderly, I would love to be put out of business. But there just aren't. And people are lonely. And this is something he thinks...

[01:07:14] And it has been shown to help. They did a trial in New York City for a couple of years. Yeah. When I was at ZDNet, we actually worked on... We interviewed people who had used it. So... And they talked about the things they liked. They talked about what they didn't like. It's a story from Sabrina Ortiz at ZDNet that really interviewed people. And on balance, they found it quite useful and helpful and were wanting to keep using it after the trial. Yeah.

[01:07:43] It feels like it would be better to get a dog, though, than a robot. So we did a study. A dog can be hard to look after. I guess it's a lot of work, right? Yeah. My day job has a lot to say about loneliness and human interaction. Yeah. And so we did. We did a limited study about four years ago. And we took a bunch of these AI companions, put them into the hands of some people who needed some sort of companionship. And it helped.

[01:08:13] I mean, the test for neuroplasticity looked very, very good. You had people who were engaging far more than they would if they were alone. And surprisingly, the one metric that we really enjoyed was the fact that the residents who used these devices tended to reach out to real humans more than they would have otherwise. That's interesting. So that was an interview. It's a kind of a wedge to kind of move them in that interactive direction. It's really true. And I've seen that.

[01:08:41] And actually, one of the neat things about LEQ is they do, between users, they do like a bingo night every Wednesday. So everyone with an LEQ plays bingo. Oh, that's cool. And then they also have these tours. And they actually go live with a tour guide in a city, like say, you know, at the Vatican or in Paris. And the tour guide is showing them around live. It has a little TV screen. And you can actually ask questions and say, oh, look over, can you move over this way so I can see what's over here? So it's really helping.

[01:09:08] It's not just a computer talking to you. It's kind of helping bridge a connection to people. I think we're going to see more of this. Actually, the founder of iRobot, which went bankrupt this year, last year, his new endeavor, he hasn't gone public with exactly what it's going to do, but the name is intelligent. Oh, it's Familiar Machines and Magic. The new robotics company, Familiar Machines and Magic. And I think, and I spoke with him, I interviewed with him on The Vergecast a while ago,

[01:09:38] and he kind of hinted at how, you know, this loneliness epidemic could really be solved, we could help solve it with robotic companions. So I think we'll be seeing something from him along these lines too. So I think, yes, I think it is something that, to answer your question, Leo, it is a trend we're going to see more of. It's sad that we need it, but maybe we do. Yeah, it is. And we shouldn't also try to find ways to get humans involved too. Like one of the things that I do in my spare time

[01:10:05] is work with, you know, youth literacy programs. And one of the things we do with is getting kids, if they want to sort of find ways to make their community better. And one of the ways is often going and visiting, you know, people who are lonely, like in their community, like, hey, can we think of anybody, you know, who doesn't have many people to visit them and do it? So like, we should also find the human ways to do this in addition to the technology ways. How much is Lil Milo,

[01:10:32] the most irrationally loved product from The Verge? I don't believe there was a price or a lease date. So this is, and we should mention this as we do every year, that a lot of what you see at CES is pre-release may never be released. That's right. Now we did see, speaking of pre-release products that have run into challenges, the company that did the Jibo robot, maybe the most famous CES robot of all time. Which I owned. Of course you do. I bought, of course. You're Leo, you know.

[01:11:02] So, and, but they have another product and actually two of the most maybe polished of these products that were especially aimed at kids were by them. And part of it was because one of the products they've actually had out for a while, it's called the Luca robot, L-U-K-A. So the Luca robot is a robot that reads to kids. So it reads books and they've already sold something like 10 million of these worldwide. I think mostly in Asia, but the Luca robot, there's a new version that has AI

[01:11:31] that they showed off at the show, the Luca robot. Not only will read to kids, can you put a physical storybook in front of them and it can read to them and it is very cute, but it also then can interact with them, right? It's more, uses AI to interact with them in terms of the storytelling. And then they had another product, this other product, the Luca, it's like a tablet. It's essentially like a ruggedized tablet

[01:12:00] that has a camera on it and they can go around and it sort of, it hangs around their neck. This is aimed at like, I think like kindergartner, first grader sort of kids. They go around and they get in the real world and it works in like museums and things like that too. They can take a picture and then ask questions of the things that they're seeing. So they were pretty advanced. I was a little bit shocked at how advanced some of these things were. And these were one of the ones that, because they were so good,

[01:12:30] I was kind of asking them questions about privacy. I was asking about like, what models do you use? You know, where does the data go? They had good answers and clearly they had thought through some of that. And some of these products, their products are already in market. So that was good, but I still just had a lot of questions about, wow, getting kids sort of almost like addicted to sort of daily interactions with technologies. You know, some of my questions about that.

[01:12:58] Would I wanted to have give that to a kid, you know, a kindergartner, first grader, preschooler? I'm not sure. It feels dystopian. It feels like 1984, a brave new world where children are raised in creches and, you know, they don't, they have mechanical tenders and minders and so forth. But as Darren points out in our Club Twit user group, if it solves a problem and we don't have another solution, maybe we say, oh yeah, it should be solved better.

[01:13:27] Yeah, but if we don't have another solution, better that than nothing, I guess. It helps fill the gap. Yeah. Well, let's continue with Father Robert's top five countdowns. We're going to go to number four now in the Father Robert hit parade. The best of Cs. Number four, the Dinsys Z1 exoskeleton. I first started seeing consumer grade exoskeletons five years ago and to say that they were early would be generous.

[01:13:55] The 2026 models are light, long lasting, and far more comfortable. Of the units that I tried, the most comfortable and intuitive was the Dinsys Z1. Made from carbon fiber with a design that contours to your legs, the Z1 is a knee exoskeleton for those who suffer from joint pain. A single charge on its swappable battery will provide up to 9.3 miles of climbing assist, during which time it will offload up to 150 kilograms of weight, provide up to 20 kilograms of lifting support,

[01:14:23] and reduce stress on your knees, making you feel up to 44 pounds lighter. I tested a Z1 at the Dinsys booth, and it really is a strap-in and use experience. I could immediately feel the assist while walking, standing, and caring. There is no input required aside from regular leg motions, and the device is smart enough to know how much to engage the assist function. At just over $1,000 a unit, it's a solid option for anybody who needs a bit more stability while walking, those who are standing for long periods of time,

[01:14:51] and the outdoorsman who doesn't mind going a little Robocop. It's kind of like an e-bike for hikers. It is. You know, the first one I tried a few years back, it was cool because, yeah, you felt like Iron Man, but it was extremely clunky, and it was not comfortable. The Z1 was the first one where I thought, I could wear this all day. I mean, I'd look funny, but I would totally wear it. All right.

[01:15:19] Our reporter, Sean Hollister, wore one around CES the entire show, both this year and last year, different models. Wow. He reported about it last year, and then this year he wore the Wii Robotics one. I would totally do that. Oh, my gosh. Did he like it? I mean, it's great for CES. Yeah, I mean, it helps because you're walking so much. Yeah. Yeah, he loved it. Wow. And the one he wore last year was quite clunky, and the one he wore this year, you barely even noticed it was on him. So these are definitely getting a lot easier,

[01:15:48] and actually it packs down into a little box like this big, so it's really easy to carry around. The Z1, it fits into a case that's like this big. Yeah. So interesting. Yeah. Kind of an unexpected area. Let's take a break. We've got lots more to talk about. We're doing our CES wrap-up with three who were there and one who was not and is very happy. Jennifer Patterson-Tui from The Verge, Father Robert Ballassier, the Digital Jesuit,

[01:16:17] and Jason Heiner, his brand new publication covers AI, the Deep View of AI, and that's a free subscription if you go, is it thedeepview.com? Subscribe.thedeepview.com. Yeah. Very nice. Very nice. Great to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by Bitwarden. We love our friends at Bitwarden. It's the password manager I use and recommend. I'm of a strong opinion that if you're going to use any product

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[01:20:09] Use it at business too. Bitwarden.com slash twit. This is the only password manager I recommend. This is the one you should use. Bitwarden.com slash twit. Thank you so much for supporting This Week in Tech. Meta showed its wristband. Now they had this wristband. I know Jennifer, I think it's Victoria who uses the Meta Ray-Ban display glasses. Victoria Song is a big fan of those. Have you tried those at all?

[01:20:37] No, I've actually got, these are smart glasses, but they don't have. What? They don't have a camera. Ah, which ones are you wearing? These are actually the Amazon Echo Frames. And do you like them? Or you just wear them? I actually got these specifically because I just wanted audio for me. I wasn't looking for them. That's one thing Metas do very well. That sound is very good on those glasses. Yes, yes. Is it as good on the frame? It's fine.

[01:21:06] No, I think the Metas are better, but I got these for a hundred bucks, whereas the Metas are a lot more expensive. And do you have your prescription in them too? So they're your spectacles. Okay. I use them as my glasses. And all I wanted at this stage was audio because I think at some point I'm going to want what is coming with smart glasses. I just don't feel like we're there yet. So this is kind of my stop gap. There's also the privacy concern of having a camera in there. Yes, exactly. Would you be banned from taking those on a cruise ship? Because I know most cruise ships

[01:21:36] are banning them now. Yeah, MSC, I think, announced that they're not going to allow them. In public spaces, you can have it in your cabin. Royal as well. Anything with a camera. Yeah, I mean, because this doesn't do any recording. These don't do any recording. It's just like having speakers. I think, you know, for years museums said, no cameras in the museum. We don't want to take pictures. But now everybody has a smartphone. How are you going to ban that? I think we're just going to have to get used to the idea that people are going to be... Victoria took her Meta Ray-Bans to Italy

[01:22:03] and she wrote a story about seeing lots of Renaissance butts. And how she used the Meta glasses to say, okay, tell me about this butt. How many butts have I seen today, Meta? And she said it was great for that experience, getting that information right to her without having to pull out her phone and write things in. And just say, tell me about this. It's a tour guide. Yeah. Yeah. There were a lot of glasses at the show this year.

[01:22:33] X-Real was there. Of course, Google's got their XR. Were you impressed by any of them? Were any of them particularly something to write home about? Or is it more of the same? So V said no. I didn't see all of them. But she was like, eh. This is kind of her beat. We're kind of boring this year. Yeah. A lot of iterations, I think. And like I was sort of saying, it's like we're still waiting to get to that next point. I saw a couple people testing one with like a little scroll screen,

[01:23:02] like what the Metas are going to be doing and showing you. And you have a little ring to scroll through what you're reading. Metas put a teleprompter now in their display. So you can read ads as I walk around the show floor. It would. I mean, and you could see a lot of use case for that for, you know, in business and for any sort of professional, like having been able to pull up that kind of information right in front of you. But I just feels like from what I understand, I didn't see any of these devices myself because I was chasing robots.

[01:23:32] But is that you, that nothing's quite at that level where it's going to be mass market adoption yet. There's still a lot. To break through. Yeah. None of them are ready to break through quite yet. I do think the teleprompter one is pretty interesting for, so I used the, during this past year, I used the Even Realities G1 and G2 products that have a teleprompter built in. And I used it in two things on stage where I had to sort of write,

[01:24:02] you know, some remarks and go up and say them. And it worked great. I thought it was, it was very good. Nobody noticed that it was a teleprompter, at least didn't say anything to me. And several of them I asked, you know, and I told them like, hey, I was using, they're like, well, no, I would never would have known. Is it listening to you? How does it know what you're reading? Yeah. So it's a teleprompter and it sort of automatically uses AI to, you know, automatically move it forward so you're not scrolling it yourself. So one of the things I don't like about the meta is the display

[01:24:31] is just in one eye kind of down. Yeah. How do the Even displays do it? Yeah, that one's in both eyes. So it's monocolor though. So it's only green. It looks like a green screen. Yeah, but that's fine. It is. Right? It's fine. And it's bright. It's much brighter. It feels much brighter than the, I've also used the Meta Ray-Bans display and the problem with it being in one eye is it does feel pretty washed out, you know, because of that. You can turn it up really bright, but it's still not great.

[01:25:00] One of the things I'm really interested in is the idea of having, and this is why I'm interested maybe in the metas, an AI assistant there to talk to, to ask questions of, I really want a heads up display so it can go, that's Jennifer Patterson too. You used to have her on Twitter. You want the facial recognition. I want face recognition. I want that store. Don't go in that store. That's a great place to get pho. That kind of thing. I want that kind of, because, you know, as I become more and more enamored of AI,

[01:25:29] I kind of want to have it with me. You want it with you. That's one of the reasons what made me, why I pulled the trigger on the frames, even though these are kind of an older generation now, is it does have A+. Oh, it does? Yes. So they brought it to the glasses and the buds. And then also the B is, I think it'll be coming. Oh, you still have your B. Yeah, Amazon bought them. I just got one at the show. They gave me one to try. I got it a year ago

[01:25:58] when they announced at CES last year. Yeah. Wore it for six months. I saw you said in our Verge comments, actually, that you were getting rid of it. Yeah, because Amazon bought it. Amazon, I know. So I spoke to them about it at the show. The founder was there. Maria's great. We've interviewed her. Very nice. Yeah. Very nice people. And they say, what, we're not giving that data to Amazon? And they've added additional privacy and protection layers. Like no one can access any of the recordings, not even B.

[01:26:28] There's no, you know, they've reinforced their privacy because obviously there has been a lot of concern from users around that. But Amazon and B haven't announced exactly what's going to happen with B and Amazon, but it does seem fairly likely that we're going to see this sort of sink into the Alexa Plus ecosystem sooner rather than later as another input method for their AI, which they're very much trying to take outside of the home,

[01:26:56] which they've been trying to do for a long time, but with not much success. But now it seems like, I think they're gearing up to be a competitor here. Leo, if you want, you know, a good language model on a pair of glasses, like, so you have it access all the time. The thing is, you don't really want the metas because it uses Lama 4 and it's just not very good. yeah, I've tried it. No, I have the first generation. Yeah. But if you use the Solos glasses, so S-O-L-O-S

[01:27:25] or Rokid, R-O-K-I-D, those you can both use GPT-5 on. Oh, all right. So you have access to sort of the latest models. And they look pretty nice too. They're not bad looking glasses. Yeah. These are the Solos. They're very similar. They, they all look a lot like, you know, the Meta Ray-Bans, right? The original sort of black Meta Ray-Bans. Some of, you know, the Solos have different ones you can, you can use, but, you know, okay. That's a little geeky looking.

[01:27:55] I admit, they're pretty nerdy. I think the, the, the ones that even realities G ones are probably, and G twos are probably the best looking. They really, they're made designed by Swiss designers. Yeah. And they're, they're, they're made to be like premium glasses. And so I, I find them sort of as the best aesthetically, you know, of, of the ones that are out there. Um, the software is still catching up, but it also will do, it has their own models. And then you, it has,

[01:28:25] you can use chat GPT essentially with it as well. But the software is, this hardware is amazing. The software is still catching up. Um, I'm sure it'll get better, but the Solos and the Rokid, the software works a little better on those two. I should mention, uh, that the, uh, a word plus Amazon's echo, uh, AI system is now available on the website to everyone. Yeah. This is part of their real push to, uh, said to take a out of the home. Um, it ain't,

[01:28:55] you know what? It's not bad. Our, one of our echo devices got upgraded and, uh, Lisa, my wife was talking to it and was kind of, wow, I'm kind of having a, she used to swear at the other one, kind of having a nice conversation. Cause it would follow up. You could, you can ask it more difficult questions. I noticed Google's doing the same thing with their voice assistant. They've added Gemini to it. And of course, part of the reason both are moving in that direction is because Apple, at some point in the next few months,

[01:29:23] we think is going to release Siri with that kind of capability, probably based on white, white box Gemini. Yeah. They'll probably won't use Gemini as the word Gemini in it, but you know, um, yeah, right. Yeah. Siri couldn't get any dumber. So Amazon has a headstart here. And in terms of, um, being in the home space, they launched their, um, agentic AI version of Alexa a lot sooner than, than any of their competitors.

[01:29:51] And whilst the agentic elements are still a bit shaky, and I have tested a few of them, it does, it can actually do things for you, which is something that none of the others have really accomplished yet. Although the chances are they will get leapfrogged at some point here, although I think they use a variety of different models behind the scenes. So who knows exactly? Um, I think Claude is one of the, um, partners for Amazon. Um, I guess I'm all in on Claude now that I'm spent spending so much money. Yeah.

[01:30:21] I better use Claude. I have them all right. I've had the $20 subscription for everybody. Um, didn't pay for Grock. I have an, uh, a non-consensual blue tick is, as Corey Doctorow calls it, but I still got Grock. Uh, Brock is in a lot of trouble. Um, they, uh, like it, uh, generating non-consensual deep fake, uh, nudity at scale, at scale. Impressive. Yeah. in fact, they've been banned now from, uh, Indonesia, some, some,

[01:30:50] a number of countries, uh, the U S refuses to do anything about it. Apple and Google are getting a lot of heat because they, despite, uh, the app store and, uh, Elon's only response at first was to apologize. And then, uh, now he says, well, you can't have it for free. If you want deep fakes, you're gonna have to give me money. I mean,

[01:31:18] it does limit the number of users that can do it for sure, but it doesn't solve. X is such a cesspool. Anybody still using X get out while you still can't. None of you use X. Do you, I haven't been on X for a year and a half now. I think. Yeah. I mean, it is still for everybody. It's still a place where people announce. When Bob weird passed, my wife said, did Bob weird die? And I said, well, let me check. Where do you go? You go to X.

[01:31:46] There are still pockets as well of certain industries that are kind of isolated themselves on X and they don't, they're not really involved with the melange. That's what you have to do is. Yeah. And so some things you do. You're no evil. See no evil. Someone the other day who was saying, yeah, they would love to get off X, but the, um, VC. Twitter is still a huge space. Um, so for journalists in particular, it's something that, well,

[01:32:16] we have an excuse as journalists. We kind of need to visit the system. I don't really engage on it, but I do check. Oh, I never engage. Security Twitter disassembled about a year ago, a year and a half ago. Science Twitter. Science Twitter. I think black Twitter. I had it working properly because the little block bot that I had created, which would no longer work with the new version of Twitter, by the way, it was fantastic at, at weeding out the most toxic users. Right. Who would even remotely interact with my account. Just block them. Block them.

[01:32:45] But, but then that, you know, then he started charging more for the API and that just became a non-starter. Uh, we are going to talk in just a bit about the toilet that looks at your poop, but every CES, every CES, unless, you know, that's one of your picks. I don't know. Let's find out. Number three on the father Robert hit parade. Watch. Number three, the Jackery solar Mars bot.

[01:33:13] Imagine living off grid and never having to worry about properly placing your solar panels for energy capture. That's possible with the Jackery solar Mars bot, an AI enabled autonomous vehicle that is part robot, part power bank. At the top of the bot are six solar panels that are safely stored in the bot's hat that is held by a double axis arm that allows for 60 degrees of tilt. In that hat is a light tracking sensor that determines the optimal inclination of the solar panels for capture.

[01:33:40] The lighting system automatically rotates the bot and angles the hat before deploying its panels for up to 600 watts of power generation. When deployed, the unit's AI can waypoint to optimal charging locations, follow users and automatically return the bot to its charging station on overcast days or when its energy storage is full. The unit I played with has a 5,000 watt hour battery, a complement of USB C, PD, 110 and 220 volt outputs, and up to 3,000 watts of constant power.

[01:34:08] That's enough to keep a small off grid cabin fully powered for two days, even without additional sunlight. So it's totally niche. I get it. How much power can you generate with a little panel though? I mean, it's not that big. 600 watts. 600 watts. But how long does it take to do that? Well, I mean, that's the thing about the solar tracking. So rather than having to build your house or your cabin so that it properly positions your panels. Just put that thing in the yard? And it moves around?

[01:34:37] You put it in the yard and you let it go from spot to spot, always optimizing its solar capture. Actually, it's a cool idea. Yeah. It is neat. They actually, I mean, that came out, they launched that a couple of years ago. I'm not sure it's actually ever shipped though, right? Or did it, maybe announce it in 23. But it is a neat idea though. The thing that really caught my eye at CES from Jackery was the gazebo, the solar power. Oh, the solar gazebo. Yeah, that was cool. Okay.

[01:35:04] I don't have anywhere to put a gazebo, but what, so this is, this is a, it sits outside and actually doesn't look like a gazebo. It looks like a little, little house out there. Yeah. And it has 2000 watts of solar panels and an integrated lighting and a pull down projector screen and outlets. And you can put the Jackery power stations in it so that you can basically. So is it a man cave? What is it? Outdoor. Yeah. It's an outdoor. Oh, it's a, oh yeah. You'd put it in your patio.

[01:35:34] Yeah. It's a, it's like a solar cover for your patio. I see. Yeah. So you just hang out. Oh, that's clever. I know, but like 15,000. Oh, now Leo wants it. Well, if you put in, we used to have, uh, our old house had 30 or 40 solar panels. It was much more than $15,000, but it was great. I mean, we, we were off the grid. We had two Tesla batteries and I never had to worry. Uh, this is interesting. I think I've wanted to be off grid for a while. Just get a piece of land in the middle of nowhere,

[01:36:04] Nevada. And I'm kind of getting into the, the renewables now. So, so 2000 Watts, 10 kilowatt hours a day. Is that, I guess that's enough to, you, you know, small house refrigerator. Could I have a refrigerator? I mean, it doesn't have walls. So this isn't really for living. No, no, no. I know. But this power is the house it's attached to. It's not right. Right. No, I think it's just powering itself. Oh, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.

[01:36:33] I think it's just so that you can power your outdoor appliances and things. Oh, I see. I want it to power the house. The rule of thumbs is per person. You're going to be budgeting about 2000 watt, watt hours a day. Oh, so this would be enough to drive your family of five could have exact live off this. Yeah. Well, you have to live underneath the gazebo. In that respect, if you could plug it into your internal. It looks like you could. Yeah. It looks like you could put it into your house.

[01:37:04] Especially like my house. I can't put panels on. Right. I don't want to put them on the roof. Yeah. Well, I also have too many trees. Like we could only put panels in like a little corner. Um, and now if I could put this in a sunny spot in my yard, I could get more power. Instead of just sticking the solar farm in your yard, you put a nice gazebo in your yard. Um, yeah. Yeah. But Chakri does come up with some pretty innovative stuff. So. Yeah. I, I did like their, um,

[01:37:33] they've got a power station that it's not, you can't submerge it, but it is basically waterproof. And that I kind of like because you're going to be using a lot of these out in the outdoors. right. Uh, let's see what else here. Oh, the throne. What did I do my ad yet? No, I was going to do an ad. I'm sorry. Let me do the ad and then the throne. Then we'll check out the throne. You're watching this week in tech, our CES episode,

[01:38:00] all the great stuff that may never make it to your house with Jennifer Pattison, Tui, Jason Heiner and father, Robert Ballasair. Our show. Okay. It's coming from inside the house. Our, uh, our show today brought to you by a brand new sponsor. And I'm really excited. I don't even know if you know about this, Robert, but this is really cool. Meter meter is the company building better networks.

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[01:41:53] This is the new standard for networking. Brand new, very exciting. Meter.com slash twit. I want you to check it out. Meanwhile, the throne is checking out your poop. As, as Daniel Cooper says it in gadget, who doesn't want a camera in their toilet? Now this isn't a whole toilet. This is just a camera. You hook onto the side. We do see these every year at CES. Yes. Um,

[01:42:24] why? Is there a demand? It is. It is. Well, you, you can learn a surprising amount of very accurate information about the state of your body by what comes out of it. So, of course. All of these companies are. That's why doctors are always asking for samples, right? Exactly. Exactly. I mean, it shows what your metabolic rate is. It shows if you've got any buildup of toxins.

[01:42:47] And if you can have a piece of technology that just sits in that receptacle all day, why wouldn't you? Yeah. Hmm. I can think of lots of reasons. I am shocked. Shocked. Jennifer Pettison-Tui that you don't actually have one of these in your lab. A camera in my toilet. No. No. I leave all that stuff to be... Sean Hollister. Let Sean do it. If there was a robot that followed you around with a little bag, you'd be okay with that, right? I mean,

[01:43:17] because that's your beat. So, no best of CES award for the whoop. For the poop toilet. No, I do think that the pee one from last year did win an award. There was one. Oh, there you go. The why things pee thing. Yeah. But yes, this is, I mean, measuring the metrics, you know, having every part of our body and movement tracked. It's the quantified self, baby. Yes. That's where we're moving.

[01:43:48] Yeah. And then you feed it all into your smart home AI, and then your home can kind of respond to you and say, no, do not take the big steak out of the fridge. It's bad for you. It's going to tell you what you're allowed to do now, and then we're all going to be in trouble. I mean, really, we're all, look, I mean, I wear an Apple watch. I wear a continuous glucose monitor. I wear an aura ring. I mean, we're all, you know, kind of putting on these devices.

[01:44:16] I admit they're still a little bit less than, you know, fully operative, but we're getting there. In fact, Apple. I remember chat CPT health was just released this week too. Yeah. Announced and not, not fully released. I want to hook that up so that you hook up, you put it on your iPhone and you hook it up to your Apple health. Right. I signed up. I haven't gotten it yet. Yeah. Multiple sensors. You can upload, you know, your test results to it. You can do all kinds of things.

[01:44:46] Now, what they said is, you know, the Fiji CMO, the CEO of apps said that 200,000 people a month are already uploading their, and asking about health questions and uploading their data. I can say that I knew two people this past year who had something come up in their health. They essentially were going to have to get a,

[01:45:15] a, an appointment with a specialist that was a month away. So they got sort of a negative indicator. Right. And they were like, okay, we'll schedule appointment for the specialist for you look at. So they freaked out. Right. Because like you do like, oh my gosh, you know, I've got something that's going to be terrible. And in both cases, these are two separate people that just reached out to me and told me this. In both cases, they took, they, they went on their health portal, downloaded the test themselves,

[01:45:44] upload it to chat GPT in one case and Claude in the other case. And they said, you know, read this for me. Should I be worried? And in both cases, it gave them very detailed interpretations of the, of the data. There's some risk there though, isn't there? Hallucinations of inaccuracies. I mean, I don't know. Yeah. But in both cases, but it was enough that before they went to the specialist, they had something to ask. They were like a little relieved. And in one case, so the one was relieved. Um, and when she went to the doctor,

[01:46:14] when, um, this person went to the doctor, uh, they told them something very similar. The other one, um, when they went to the doctor, uh, they shared that, um, that they were, uh, and they said, Hey, this is what I got from chat GPT. And the specialist looked at and was like, wow, that's pretty good. Actually. That's really, really, that's really close. Can you, can I, can you leave this with me? You know, so I can have a copy. Um, and so it was, it was really interesting. So I guess my,

[01:46:44] my point is just that people are doing it already. There are all kinds of reasons to be wary about uploading, you know, very sensitive data that could have, you know, very negative ramifications if it were leaked and someone accessed, you know, your health data to, to a source like chat GPT. But, uh, you know, at the same time, we have to expect that this is coming, not just from open AI, but from all of the others, you know, as well. Oh yeah.

[01:47:11] Remember Google and Apple and Amazon and other have been trying to do things like this for years and get people to put all their health data in their ecosystems. Yeah. Well, or in your toilet as, as the case may be. Or in the toilet too. Upload your toilet data. Amazon wants to send everyone free toilets. They can have all that data for free. Moving on. Jennifer, your favorite device of a CES was the Akara smart lock. It's funny.

[01:47:41] I just replaced all my Akara's with Schlage. Did I make a mistake? Which Schlage? The, the, the, yeah. It's a home kit enabled. Yes. You didn't make mistake. That's a great lock. Oh good. If you're happy with, uh, Apple home key, that is, that's what I wanted. I wanted to walk up to the door and have it open. Cause I, I have my iPhone in my pocket. Yeah. I did. Well, because the Schlage won't be able to do that. The new Schlage,

[01:48:10] which they announced last year and still hasn't launched. Oh, we'll be able to do it. Okay. But what is so special about the U 400 is, um, it's the first smart lock to support Apple home keys, hands-free unlocking. That's what I wanted. It uses, WB. Um, and that has, so this, there's two locks. Cause I can do that with my car now. And I really like that. The same technology. It's exactly the same technology. Uh, and so this is just, so it was announced,

[01:48:40] uh, a couple of years ago that Apple was going to support this in home key. So it's the same concept as home key, but the home key that you have with the Schlage lock is tap. Right. So tap. Yeah. Yeah. I don't, it's NFC. Yeah. I don't mind tap because I'm a little nervous that the door will, uh, walk just open. Lock when you don't want to. Yeah. Or lock when I, yeah. This is what's taken a while for the technology to come out because obviously you've had it, but this is something you have in the car too, is it does have directional awareness. The UDWB makes a big difference.

[01:49:10] Yes. It knows that you're approaching from which direction you're approaching. And actually when you set up the lock in a Kara's app or in the home, Apple home app, there's a little, you can turn off approach from direction. So you can turn it. So it's just from, from the front of the door. Don't come in from the side. If you want, but if you know, my house, my path is along the side. So I want that on, but you can control where it's detecting you from. But it,

[01:49:38] one of the key things is it does not open when you are walking from inside your house. That's something I had to turn off in my car because my car, I'm above my, the garage right now. My car was unlocked like, you know, all the time it was going. So I finally had to say, and BMW just added this feature. Yeah. When I'm at home, don't do that. Yeah. So this, no, this is designed to, it will not unlock from, if you're anywhere inside the house. Good.

[01:50:07] That's what I was worried about. And it will not unlock. If you just walk past the house, it knows intent of directions. So you have to be walking up to it, up to the door. And also it knows velocity. So if you're walking slowly, it will unlock a little bit later. Like, so it's going to unlock at the same time, no matter how fast you're moving. That's clever. And running to get in a little quicker. So you can, no matter what, as you get to your door and open the handle. That's cool. It's, it's,

[01:50:37] it's, it's very impressive. And that's why I chose this lock because it's the first one that supports Apple home key. But what's really interesting here, and which is why it was more relevant at CES, because Apple home is quite a niche system still, even though there's a lot of people that use it. Um, it's still small, but it's Apple is part of a new protocol called Alero, which is a smart lock standard that is going to bring all of the home key

[01:51:05] features that tap to unlock and the UWB hands-free unlocking to any platform. So Apple, Samsung and Google are involved. They're all part of this. And all the major lock manufacturers are part of it as well. And, and it's specifically, and one of the big concerns people have about this obviously is, well, if someone steals my phone, can they unlock my house? Well, if someone steals your key, can they unlock your house? I mean, that isn't something that's going to go away.

[01:51:34] But the nice thing about a smartphone is you can remotely wipe it. Can't do that with a key. Um, but you do, it does require you to turn off the facial recognition or fingerprint unlocking that you might have on your phone because it's not going to work with the whole hands-free point is that you know, not completely just for this lock. Wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait a minute. Point. I, when do I turn it off? So when you set up hands-free unlock in Apple home,

[01:52:04] it will say enable express mode, which you may have seen with the home key NFC feature, which means you can use this without authenticating by unlocking the phone. So, because it's faster. You, you still have to have authenticated that you're, that it's your phone at some point within the last, I think it's 24 hours is the time window. So if you, you know, if your phone was lost for a while and someone picked it up, it wouldn't, they wouldn't be able to use it. But yeah,

[01:52:33] it does require you to turn off, turn on express mode, which bypasses facial recognition or pin, pin code authentication. So if you are worried about it from that perspective, then this is not a technology for you, but it is, I mean, it is hands-free. You do not need to touch your door other than to unlock it. But door manufacturers are working towards automatic opening as well. We've actually seen,

[01:52:58] there was a new company that just launched last December called Doma from the founders of August, which was the first smart lock that had this hands-free unlock capability, but that used Bluetooth, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS and three radios working together invariably meant it was not very accurate. But this is a very specific radio to antenna, phone to lock technology that in my,

[01:53:25] I got to test this before CES and it worked flawlessly. It was a really good experience. And what's great about this new standard Alero is it's bringing this technology to every platform and every manufacturer across handsets and locks. So it's not going to be just limited to Apple going forward. Hallelujah. Which is, yeah. And it's a great example of how standards are working in the smart home to make the smart home a lot easier and more accessible. And it's not just for,

[01:53:54] for homes either. This could also be used for offices, businesses. So you could just basically use your phone as a key for everything, which, yeah, I mean, I can, there are obviously the other concern, the concern about security is hacking and they do. This is one of the reasons it's taken a really long time to launch this standard that, well, not really long, but they were supposed to launch it earlier last year. And it's now not launched. It's launching this quarter is, but they use asymmetric.

[01:54:25] I'm going to test my memory right here. It's asymmetric security. So it's not. So every time the code is sent between the two devices is different. So the rolling code for your garage door. So you're not going to, even if someone did manage to hack in and get the code the next time, it's going to be different. So that should, I mean, obviously once it's in the real world, we'll see if there are any flaws, but they feel pretty confident.

[01:54:54] I spoke to the head of Alero at CES and they wouldn't give me the exact details yet because the spec hasn't been released, but they said they feel pretty confident that the security is, is really high. And I said, this has been developed by a number of companies. So they're working and, you know, for a lock manufacturer like Schlage and Assa Abloy and Yale, the Kwikset, they're all on board. And they've, when I've spoken to them, they've also said that they feel like this is a real game changer for the smart lock space.

[01:55:23] So that was my pick. I can't believe I just bought the Schlage. I'm sorry. I don't think it'll work in my place because our locks have like seven pound keys. I don't think that's going to work. I mean, at this, at this point, I'm not sure that's retrofittable to the BC, BC buildings. Yes. Anything before the dark ages.

[01:55:50] In your case means you could bludgeon another human being with it. If they try to mug you. Our smart locks is there's, there's a Jesuit brother standing by the door and we'll unlock it for you. Or a Swiss guard with a helper. It's smarter than that. Yes. Much smarter. Yes. Oh, which by the way, Leo. So I was very enamored by the anti-gravity drone that was being displayed at CES. I really wanted to get one from my office. Yeah. And I got the expense approved. And then I got a message from a friend in the Swiss guard who said, don't,

[01:56:20] don't bring that. No drones. Are they really from Switzerland, by the way? These Swiss guard? They are. They are. Although there is a Filipino Swiss guard two years ago. He was the very first one. You just have to be born in Switzerland. So his parents were from the Philippines. There you go. Yeah. That's really, so they kind of on loan to the Pope from Switzerland? It's a choice. It's a choice assignment. So they only send their best. They send the people who are a bit elite. The best people in the best clown outfits. Precisely.

[01:56:49] And the pay is not great, but it's completely untaxable. Oh. And you continue to receive half of it for the rest of your life. Oh, nice. If you complete your tour. So it's kind of nice. That's pretty cool. Cool. What about this lock-in that you have on your article? It looks like it's in a time tunnel. What is that all about? So that's a different smart lock.

[01:57:14] So this is another really interesting technology around smart locks is wireless charging. And this lock-in was showing off a new type of wireless charging that it's using because now most smart locks... That thing around it isn't just like for show that's actually charging it, the time tunnel it's in? No, that was just for show. Oh, okay. It does look like that's how you go through that and you get all charged up. I was about to say, wait a minute.

[01:57:43] So it's radiating stuff? Well, what is it? Is it? Is it wireless charging? Yeah, so if you scroll down in the article to the section where I mentioned the lock, there's a little picture. There's a picture and you can see the little puck. You have to click to the right. Oh, it's got a little puck. It's a little puck, yeah. So if you click to the right, there's another image there. Oh, I see. And the puck is plugged in and then... So that's reasonable because otherwise I'm putting in batteries every few months in my smart lock. That's the issue with smart locks right now.

[01:58:12] And that's why locks are limited right now because you can't... So you've seen, you've probably seen on the show floor this year, there were facial recognition, 3D facial recognition locks. There were palm vein unlocks. This lock in particular has so many different ways that you can unlock with finger vein, palm vein, 3D recognition. The handle is a palm reader. So as you hold it, the door reads your palm. I like that. What's a finger vein though?

[01:58:42] Is that different from fingerprint? Yes. And that's the palm vein is the same, uses the same technology. So it's actually reading the blood running through your veins rather than the fingerprint because fingerprints can be manipulated. They can be also inaccurate. Is there something unique about the blood running through my veins? The vein pattern is unique on your palm and your finger. So it's considered more accurate than a fingerprint.

[01:59:11] So, but it has, so it has three biometric unlockings. It has two cameras. It has a, for the built-in video doorbell. And then it has the interior and exterior touchscreen, which that, with the cute little avatar. So you can create an avatar that greets visitors for you. Yeah, it's a cute little guy in there. And the, but because it's got continual, like a regular door lock, if it had four AA batteries, would last like a day with all this technology.

[01:59:34] But because this one is wirelessly charged, it can power, you know, it can do things that most door locks can't. How long though? I mean, do you have to put the puck on every day? So no, the puck sits within a four meter range, somewhere in the house. As long as it has line of sight, you just plug it in. So it is radiating. It's, it's using wireless infrared charging, wireless optical charging to just continually power the lock.

[02:00:02] And it said that if the, if your power goes out in the home and the lock is not being charged, it should last up to a week, which is obviously wouldn't be good in real, you know, in a regular use. But as long as you, if you were out of power for a week, you'd, you have other issues. It would be good. Like if your cat slept on the puck and kept it from charging, you want it to keep working. It would still work for a while. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, this lock itself is very expensive and it's also a mortise lock, which most people aren't going to be using the US.

[02:00:30] So that's the European style or the really fancy high end doors will have the mortise lock. It's, it's not a deadbolt basically. So it's, it's the sort of real mechanical. I think when you, when you go into like an apartment building quite often, they have mortise door locks. So it's, they're more expensive, much heavier. They, it's yeah. Someone just dropped a picture of it in the chat that shows it has a lot. It's a different type of technology from a deadbolt. So you're, but they do have a deadbolt version.

[02:00:59] But what's interesting here is when you have wireless power, there is so much more you can do with the technology in your door. And then this one does also support matter. And they said that they are, they will have UWB support in the future too. So it would have the hands-free unlocking. So lots of exciting things going on in the door lock space. You might have a mortise lock in your, in your Vatican housing. It's a kind of old fashioned kind of lock. No, seriously. Our locks are embedded into marble.

[02:01:29] So you can have a marble mortise. Our house is really, really, part of our house goes back 500 years. And part of our house goes back, the new part of our house goes back 120 years. Oh, the new, the new quarters. The new one. Yeah. Yeah. Now you could also get a, why things body smart scale. I think I have the predecessor to this. It's got a handle that you hold while you're stepping on the scale. Yeah.

[02:01:59] That should be part of the smart lock. That should go outside and you just have to weigh in. Checking your veins. Yeah. This is interesting because this was, and, and Victoria wearables reporter was talking about this on our best of video that it's representing a kind of longevity, a shift from health tech to be about losing weight or tracking to tracking your immediate condition to be about longevity

[02:02:26] and making, helping you sort of focus on health in the way that it's going to help you live longer. My body scan scale says I am two years older than my chronological age. Right. Yeah. And this, this is supposed, supposedly does, you know, measures a number of metrics, but one of them is specifically through your foot sweat, which. I, yeah, no, I do the foot sweat test.

[02:02:53] I don't know what it's telling me, but I know you have to stand on the scale and it's in it. I don't know. Is it sending electrical current through my feet? I don't, it's doing something. Something. Something. Leo, do you, do you remember when we had a why things in the studio that broke? I, what might've been my why things? It might've been, yeah, like 10, 10, 11 years ago. It broke and on know how we improved it. Oh God.

[02:03:19] I installed a small MP3 player so that when someone stepped on it, it would go. Oh, you're too heavy. Yeah. That might've been my old one because it was tweeting my weight for a while. It was not appreciated. Oh, I remember that. I remember that. Yeah. I think this one is supposed to sort of, she was saying it sort of helps take away the focus on just your weight. Just weight. More about other, other elements of your.

[02:03:48] It does my heartbeat. It does. It does a little, you know, 30 second EKG basically. When it always says. This one, this one is a non-invasive metabolic health. So this is to do with, so maybe you don't have to use a toilet camera. You can just use. I don't know how accurate though. This can be with foot sweat. I mean. Yeah. Yeah. Well, she said there is some, there is scientific evidence to back up some of this, but we'll

[02:04:16] see once she's had a chance to test it. Victoria also liked this L'Oreal LED face mask. Yeah. Just because you could dress as Vecna for Halloween. Yeah. Ooh. There is, I will say like there's a really good scale. It's a Chinese knockoff company called Greater Goods. Yeah. It's like a smart scale. I have their, their, their, their, yeah, I have their blood pressure monitor. It's really good.

[02:04:46] Yeah. 30 bucks. They make really, really good stuff. The scale is like 30 bucks versus like a hundred or 200 bucks. Like this, this Y things is 500 or 600. 500 bucks. Yeah. It probably comes off the same assembly line. So I mean. Right. There's also that. There is also that. So anyway. It's a five o'clock. I'm kicking off. All right. You're good guys. Come on in here. You get the next shift. So if anybody doesn't want to spend 600 bucks, but wants to have like, you know, the, the basics

[02:05:13] of, uh, yeah, the smart scale that still manages to get your foot sweat. Um, yeah. Uh, digital, digitally, uh, analyzed Greater Goods, 30 bucks. That foot sweat is a bioimpedance spectroscopy. If you'd like to know the actual name. Oh, there you go. Yes. Sounds really fancy. Right on. B I S. The goal is to simulate the sweat glands. I'm reading from Victoria's piece that are inside your feet with a tiny safe current.

[02:05:42] We measure, I, I do this. I don't know what it's telling me. We measure the maximum activity response from those sweat glands. If the activity is high, it means your glands are healthy. If not, it means that it's electrocuting you to make you sweat. Actually, it's good because I am a type two diabetic. And one, as you know, one of the consequences of diabetes is, uh, that you, you can get your feet amputated because you don't have good circulation. So it's, it's actually good for it to test that. Uh, I don't know.

[02:06:11] I don't know how useful it is as a diagnostic. Anyway, I get on it every day and stand there for an hour while it's measuring all that stuff. It says you're old. Put it together the information from your smart blood pressure reader, from your smart scale. Well, that's what I'm saying. Put it all in the chat GPT. Yeah. And then it can say, uh, either my watch is stopped or you're dead. Let us, uh, go back to Casey Kasem.

[02:06:39] I think we're at number four on the top. Well, actually it's number two. It's our fourth. But it's number two in Father Robert's CES Picks watch. Number two, LG mobility. Talked away into the center of the LG booth on the show floor was their tech demonstrator for their mobility display solution. A combination of a transparent OLED display embedded into a windshield, the car sensors, and an onboard AI that delivers important context-aware information to the driver.

[02:07:10] When I first saw it, I thought that it would be too much, that the information would become a driving hazard, but it would appear that LG has put in the engineering time to make sure that only immediately usable and actionable data is presented to the driver. For example, potential hazards ahead, information about the vehicle surrounding the user, GPS directions presented by highlighting turn information, red light duration, and enhanced vision in low visibility environments. In a vehicle that has full autonomous driving, the screen can switch to visual displays

[02:07:38] that keep the users engaged and looking forward, helping them to keep at least a partial eye on the road while their vehicle has control. That's really cool. Were there a line of car products at CES? I know they took the cars out of the South Hall. They're all in the West Hall. They're all in the West Hall now. That's the new Fancy Hall. Oh, the West Hall is? Oh, okay. Well, when we come back, we could talk a little bit about other car technology.

[02:08:06] You're watching our CES wrap-up with Father Robert Ballasier, Jennifer Patterson-Tui, and Jason Heiner. So glad you're here, especially our club members. Thank you for being here. Our show today brought to you by Delete Me. Oh, man. When you go online and you do a little search for your name, I don't recommend it, you will be kind of disappointed, saddened, scared by how much personal data is out there on the internet.

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[02:11:19] Well, cars. Was it, I don't know. Jennifer, you probably don't cover cars particularly. No, I didn't make it into the West Hall at all, actually. Yeah. Because it's a trek. But I did see the Dreamy car. Dreamy had a car. Dreamy had a car. This is crazy. These companies are. I know. Was it a home automation car? Does it drive around inside? No, it was just a car. And it didn't do much. But it was very green, which I liked.

[02:11:44] But I know our automotive editor picked, was it the Mercedes? Yeah. He liked the Mercedes. The self-driving. Yeah. And he got to test it. And he was really impressed with this new kind of level two, is it? Of the four self-driving? Yeah. Level two is not, yeah. I mean, we, you know, we're not going to get anytime soon to completely autonomous vehicles.

[02:12:13] So the smart thing to do is to be reasonable about what you can do. This is Mercedes Drive Assist Pro. And Andrew Hawkins, who's a very good automotive reporter for The Verge, said it was the only thing there that they could actually test. They let him drive it. Partially autonomous driver assist.

[02:12:37] Just everybody's being very careful since Elon's been sued and the state of California said you're not going to be able to keep selling Tesla's if you keep saying it's autopilot. So everybody's being very careful about what they claim. Yeah. You know, West Hall this year, without BYD, BYD actually did make a notable splash last year. They were at CES last year, even though you can't buy them in America. They were there. That's the big Chinese EV maker. Number one car maker in the world now. Yeah.

[02:13:05] So this year we had the Sony Alfea 1, which they had last year. So it's just an incremental increase on the prototype. They had the Waymo Ojai. They had the Tensor Robo car. And then the BMW iX3. I think that was the big one because they actually had part of the parking lot so you could go outside. Now, I wish they had done what Mercedes did. Must have been 20 years ago. They used to have the thing called the Mercedes test drive. They had taken over one of the parking lots and it was actually a little course. Oh, that's fun.

[02:13:35] So you could check out a vehicle and take it around. Yeah. He actually went up to San Francisco to take a test drive. Yeah. He never comes to CES. Oh, lucky fella. But yeah, the BMW, I think, is the one that has Alexa Plus in it too, right? Yes, it does. Yes. So I saw that they had that in the Amazon booth. You couldn't drive it though. Yeah, I will never turn on Alexa on my BMW. I use Apple's CarPlay, but the BMW voice is so awful.

[02:14:05] Some of these car voices, it's like, come on, this is not even close to the standard now. But the big announcement was that with every BMW iX3 that you buy, you get, I think it's 15 cases of Drakkar Noir. So at least you smell good as you're driving around. I love it. You know, your Verge folks liked, Allison liked the, everybody likes the Galaxy Z Trifold, the three.

[02:14:35] Yeah. But I've heard some reliability issues with it. So I'm not sure you'd want to buy it. If you fold it more than 10,000 times, probably, you'll start to get some creasing. But I mean, foldable tech is actually quite durable. If you want to damage it, you can. But if you're treating it gently, it lasts forever. I have the Galaxy, the latest Galaxy Fold, just the two fold, the seven. It's quite nice. It's very thin.

[02:15:04] I am very excited about what Apple's going to do, rumored to be doing later this year. I think that might be the one. Yeah, they actually had the, they had the display. The Samsung screen was there, which they took away. And they took it away. Yeah. Did you get to see it before they took it away? No, we just saw an empty hole on the display where it was supposed to be. Well, they weren't, apparently they weren't supposed to be showing it.

[02:15:31] But of a tell on that one, for sure. Yeah. But the, you know, the Z Fold 7, I hate calling it that. The Fold 7 is the first one that's like, okay, when it's closed, it feels like a regular phone. And you're like, great. And then it opens up. So that was, it's so close. It's like 90% of the way there. So I feel like this year, you know, we get a lot closer and the Apple one will be, you know, I think really good.

[02:15:59] And the ones from, you know, the Honor Magic V5 was even a little better than the, you know, the Chinese phones have been even better for a couple of years. The Fold 7 is really catching up to them. I did want to go back. So I think this is going to be a big year for foldables. I did want to go back to one thing on the cars at CS, though, was I think the most significant thing wasn't anything that was shown there.

[02:16:25] Because most of it was really all stuff we'd heard before, seen before, or it was not that exciting. But NVIDIA announced the Alpameo model. So it's the first chain of thought reasoning model, and they released it as an open model. So a lot of the problems with, for these vehicles is, and you kind of expressed it, Leo, it's like, it's not that they don't have the hardware to do it. It's the software.

[02:16:53] The software is where a lot of the problems are. And Alpameo, NVIDIA released it as an open model. That is the worst name. Alpameo sounds like it's a dog food sandwich. What is Alpameo? I know, I know. It's a special kind of mayonnaise that you only can release. This doesn't sound good. You only eat when you're in the Alps or something.

[02:17:19] So it's safe, reasoning-based, autonomous vehicle. It utilizes the power of the edge. So they had it at the Amazon booth in the West Hall. It was one of the vendors there. And essentially, they're trying to move away from the old foundational model where you had the huge LLM that did everything. And they're allowing the local compute power to take over some of the specifics.

[02:17:42] So you take the foundational model, but then you build in your driving habits, the environment in which your car will normally exist. And it's supposed to be a more efficient way to give your car self-driving. Okay. When are we going to see these? World models too, right? I do know that the Mercedes that we talked about has an NVIDIA chip in it, an NVIDIA AI in it. When is Alpameo? Yeah. You're going to come to my car.

[02:18:13] I know. I know. Alpameo? Alpameo. Alpameo. So the thing is, they're releasing as an open model. You know, obviously works on top of their hardware. But this is going to, I think, help some of these car makers that are really struggling with the software side of things. Yeah. It's going to help them advance potentially, you know, a lot further. This is definitely NVIDIA saying, let's advance this self-driving car thing a lot faster, folks.

[02:18:41] And since you're struggling with it so badly, we're just going to give you all the technology. We're going to, you know, the software to do it. And we're going to make it available openly. You can use our hardware to do it. And we're going to streamline this so that we can speed up the development of all this. Alpameo, by the way, is one of the most conspicuous peaks in the Peruvian Andes. It's a mountain. Perfect. Thank you for clearing that up. So there. That's the first I heard it. That's the first I heard it. Yeah. It's not a sandwich. But, you know, the most interesting thing that happened in self-driving cars,

[02:19:11] it wasn't at CES, but it happened in the last month. And I feel like it was a bit under the radar, was actually Rivian going all in on AI. You know, they announced this in December. And they announced a couple specific things that are really interesting. They've been working on this essentially for four years. And they took the wraps off of it. They announced that they're making their own chip. They have one of Tesla's former, you know, engineers that's now their head of autonomy.

[02:19:40] They released their own chip. So they're sort of going to have all of their own processing power, similar to Tesla. They are integrating LiDAR into the vehicle, right? So one of the problem with the edge cases of self-driving is that, you know, in the dark, in other things, radar and LiDAR, which Tesla vehicles don't have, it makes it really tough when it's in the dark, when it's raining, when you have sort of these other edge cases. It's going to have that. It used to be.

[02:20:10] And Tesla said, we're never putting LiDAR in because it's too expensive, because it used to cost $10,000 to $20,000 to put LiDAR in the vehicle. But now it's only cost a few thousand dollars. And it doesn't have those big giant spinning things on the vehicle anymore. It's actually looks like just above the visor, you know, of the car, there's this little thing. So, you know, Rivian is taking this really far.

[02:20:36] And essentially they said they're working toward level four autonomy. That's true autonomy at that point. That's true autonomy, where you can send the vehicle to go pick up your kids, where it can drive you to the airport and then drive itself home and park itself, you know, in the garage. And so I thought that all of that stuff that they, you know, announced and they showed sort of some of the pathway to doing that. And they're also about to release this vehicle that is much more affordable,

[02:21:06] under $50,000. The average new vehicle in the U.S. is $50,000. So releasing an under $50,000 vehicle. That'd be huge. Would be big for them. This could be like Rivian's, you know, breakout year. Similar to like when Tesla released the Model 3. It feels like Rivian is building toward its sort of version of the, you know, the Model 3, but also, you know, autonomy, a pathway toward autonomy at the same time.

[02:21:32] And they see their vehicles as potentially being able to be used as, you know, robo taxis, but also for people who want to keep a vehicle and use it and have autonomy in the sort of the level four sense, you know, that they have a path to that too. So I thought that was the most important one. They weren't at CES, but it hasn't gotten much airplay. And I think that one is worth keeping an eye on because Rivian has shown the ability to make really good vehicles.

[02:22:00] And they really apparently have a very clear path on autonomy as well. So we'll see. It's a prove it moment for them in 26, but impressed by what they talked about in December. They are overachievers over there at NVIDIA, aren't they? It's just amazing. They're so, so dominant. It kind of feels like this is their version of Google's Pixel program, where they wanted to show the manufacturers what's possible with the tools that they're providing them.

[02:22:28] So, you know, you give this hardware slash software pack to a small manufacturer and you say, what sensors do you have available? What can you do? Plug them in and see what happens. I love this idea. What were you saying, Jennifer? What was at CES besides the donut light? That, the IKEA. They made their debut at CES. They even have an IKEA. Oh, what's that? This is IKEA's new Bluetooth speaker that costs $10. Okay. Does it sound?

[02:22:58] It's pink. You can pair it with up to 100. It has a quick pairing button. Oh, I like that. I got to demo this and they had 10 in their room. They didn't have 100. It'd be fun to put this all over the house though. I know. And then, yeah, because so I was playing music through one and then you just hit the little button on the top and it goes everywhere. On the next one and it pairs to that and then you just press a button on the next one and then you just end up with 100 little tiny speakers singing at you.

[02:23:27] As an agent of chaos, I approve of this idea. Does it sound okay? I mean, they're very small. I mean, it sounded fine in the room at nine going. No, not too tinny. But, you know, $10, a really fun little gadget. And their main kind of thing though was the lighting and they've moved their smart home. You love these donut lamps, huh? The donut lamp. What is it? The Varm Blixit? Varm Blixit? Yeah.

[02:23:54] Sorry, this was called the Kalsup if you're looking for the speaker. Kalsup from Varm Blixit. But so the big thing with IKEA this year is they have just announced that they're moving their entire smart line to Matter over Thread from Zigbee. And they have a new hub. Well, the hub came out a couple of years back, but the hub supports Matter and Thread. And so it's just making their smart devices so much simpler.

[02:24:18] And obviously that's a key part of IKEA's value prop is inexpensive and easy to use. And now with this donut lamp, which actually came out, the first version came out a couple of years ago and it was viral. It was all over TikTok and it was actually, it would sell out very quickly. Do you have any in your house? No. So they gave me one to take back, but I'm like, I can't fit this in my suitcase. It's pretty big. It's big. Yeah. So I was like, I'll go with the tiny Bluetooth speaker. Thank you.

[02:24:45] So I'm hopefully going to get one to try, but it comes paired with a Bill Risa remote, which is their new smart remote. Works over Matter over Thread. But when you get it out of the box, it works. You can use the remote without needing any connectivity. You don't need to connect it to your Wi-Fi or do anything. It's got built-in smarts. So you can adjust the colors and the dimming. And then if you want, you can connect it to Matter platforms.

[02:25:12] So like use it with Apple Home or SmartThings or Google Home or Alexa, just a much simpler smart home experience, which is the whole point of Matter, that interoperability and ease of setup. We will see once we get to try it. But they also had a bunch of smart sensors that they just launched that are all super inexpensive. Everything you can buy, like a smart light bulb, a color-changing smart light bulb for, I think it's going to, they said it's going to be about $5, which is when you think back to when Philips Hue first launched with that $80.

[02:25:41] Oh, it was $100. Oh, man. Smart bulbs. Yes. It's just the smart home is becoming so much more accessible and affordable. And IKEA moving into this space and coming to CES for the first time in its history is kind of a big sign of that shift towards the mainstream here with the smart connected home. And just imagine how much fun you're going to have when people come over and you say, have you seen my Wermblex light? It's paired with the Beereza remote on the Deere Jira hub. And people will go, huh? Very good.

[02:26:12] Yeah. Are those inflatable or are they- They look really cute. Is it a soft glow? Yeah. It sort of has like a frosted, not frosted. I like that. It's an accent light. It's not a reading light. Right. Exactly. But you can do, there's multiple colors you can change it to. It comes, when you pair it, the remote that it's paired to lets you cycle through like 12 different scenes that have been specially designed to fit, to look good on the donut lamp.

[02:26:38] But then you can also choose your own as well as light, warm to white light, warm to cool white light if you want more. So you could use it for task lighting. I suppose if you, you can hang it on the ceiling so you could have like two donuts hanging behind you and that would be nice. Well, I'm thinking of it in my media room. It would be, I like, I don't want a bright light in there. I want to just kind of an ambient glow and it'd be kind of cool. Can you tie it to what's on the screen? You know, you can get those ambient lights that do that. Yeah.

[02:27:07] So those things- Hue has something like that. Hue has that. And actually, Hue came with a really interesting feature. If you have Hue bulbs, you will probably be very interested in this. It's called Spatial Aware. And it uses, so you basically get your phone and you map where your hue lights are in your home. And then it can use, they've remastered their scenes to create the way the light works in the scene to fit into your home.

[02:27:37] So for example, if you are doing a sunrise scene or a sunset scene, the lights in the front, for example, would be more sort of red and dim and the lights behind you would be darker and blacker to sort of really emphasize like the feeling of the sunset. And now if you ever use a Philips Hue scene, if you've got sort of say eight or nine hue bulbs around your room or some light fixtures, you'll find that one light over here is pink

[02:28:05] and then the light in the ceiling is blue and it's all a little kind of random. Whereas now they've switched with these, this new Spatial Aware feature, everything will be much more in tune with the way, and this was a quote from them, the way the lighting designer intended. So it's basically bringing really high-end lighting design into your home. And I did an article on it with a video. It really is hard to describe.

[02:28:30] You have to see it to really understand the impact, but it is a big difference. So they would cycle through like this was what the old scene looked like. And then this is what it's like with Spatial Aware. And it's like night and day looks so much better, but you do need the new Hue Bridge Pro for it to work because it uses more processing power. But it is because I've always struggled a little bit with smart colored lighting.

[02:28:57] Like you mentioned with the connecting to your TV, that's fun if you've got the right lighting setup to be able to kind of have a bit more of an immersive ambient feel. But just turning my light bulbs different colors in my sitting room doesn't always... I'm more like warm white and cool white is great during the day. But multi-colors never really worked. But this really makes it seem like, wow, actually, I can see the purpose of having color changing lighting in my...

[02:29:25] Not just in the gaming room or not just in the TV room because it just makes... It made the room just feel so much more sort of immersive and like enjoyable to be in. So, yeah. It's good for lazy husbands because I don't have to put Christmas lights up. We just have outdoor lighting. I can make red and green and now I'm done. There you go. That was it. I just told my mom about that, that I could actually put up Christmas lights that could stay up the entire year.

[02:29:52] And I've never seen her enthusiastic about tech until I told her that. Really? Oh, wow. That was my husband too. My husband was a big fan of when I said, here, we've got some permanent outdoor lights you can try. And he's like, do you mean I don't have to climb up the ladder every year? Exactly. But we'll have to see how long the permanent part actually lasts. You've actually... You know what? I have to give you credit, Jennifer, because for a long time, home automation, especially

[02:30:17] at CES, was always like, oh, so close, but not, you know, oh, you know, who's going to really want to spend 15 hours setting all this stuff up and then it's obsolete the next week and then it doesn't work the week after that. But it's, I feel like looking, especially at your article of the smart home gadgets that impressed you, there, we've come a long way that this stuff is starting to really kind of make sense. Is that right? Yeah.

[02:30:44] This really felt like the year the smart home kind of grew up. Yeah. It was less about silly, crazy gadgets doing weird things in your home and more about here, we've made this stuff better. Right. And this stuff works and this stuff will actually make... And it works together, which is a big deal. It is a great... It was a great show for smart home standards like Matter and Thread and Alero and even some Z-Wave. And, you know, it's like this standardizing things in the smart home has made the issue

[02:31:14] of interoperability getting closer to going away. And what that translates to is that manufacturers now can focus their efforts on making products less expensive that do more because they don't have to spend all of their time figuring out how to work with five different platforms, which, you know, for most of these manufacturers was a huge amount of work and often didn't work very well. So you ended up with frustrated customers.

[02:31:41] Now they've got a clear, solid connectivity layer that they can use that connects to all the different platforms. So it means that they can focus their efforts on more features, bringing better things to your smart home devices and making things less expensive. I mean, IKEA's new smart home products that they launched this year are less expensive than their old smart home products that they've had on their shelves for a few years. So it's really a sort of sea change as we sort of see the smart home become more mainstream.

[02:32:12] And I mean, nothing's more mainstream than IKEA, to be fair. Wouldn't it be amazing if IKEA was the company that finally made all those alliances worth it? Yes. Well, this is a good... So I did a panel this year on a Matter panel. We had Amazon, Google, Samsung, IKEA and Akara were on the panel. And the IKEA guy and I had talked a lot about the Bilseira remote that I mentioned that

[02:32:41] you use to control the donut lamp. And you can use it to control anything in your... I believe that's pronounced... Bilseira. Bilseira. Bilseira. Bilseira. So the big issue, though, is that there is one smart home platform that does not support buttons in Matter. And that smart home platform is Google Home. And so the Google Home guy was on the stage and I teed up the IKEA guy.

[02:33:08] I was like, so what's been great about Matter for you and what have been some of the problems? Like, have there been problems with adoption from the platforms? And he didn't go for it, but this has been an issue. No one understands why Google does not support buttons. But the guy, he did say to me afterwards, he said, actually, I think he even posted it on LinkedIn. He said there will be...

[02:33:33] Once there are millions of buttons in people's homes, IKEA buttons in people's homes, I'm sure Google is going to stop supporting buttons. So when you say a button, what do you mean a button? So, okay, so you have smart light switches that's supported in the standard, so on-off. But button is a wireless light switch. So, essentially. So it's not like a button, like just a button. It is a term of art for a wireless switch, basically.

[02:34:03] So it is... Well, it is a button. I mean, literally... Is it always a button? Okay. This is a button. This is a Philips Hue button. Yeah. Okay. And the Bill Racer remote is a button. So it's... But it's a button because it's not wireless. Because it's not wired. So it can be anywhere. Does Apple support buttons? Yes. Apple does. Amazon does. Everyone else does. Just Google. Just not Google. Wow. And this wireless switches are a big part of the smart home. Because what's great about them is that you can control...

[02:34:31] So you can connect it to a light and have it turn the light on and off. But you could also connect it to lights in a different room or to your robot vacuum cleaner. If you want to press the button and the robot vacuum cleaner starts, you can connect it to anything in your smart home. So it just gives you a lot more flexibility. And because one of the key issues with the smart home to date has been not having physical controls for things. There was too much reliance on voice, which is hard and not always accurate. Having a physical control...

[02:35:01] Sometimes it's a pain. Delayed is really the most annoying thing when you say lights on and nothing happens. And physical controls are so key in the smart home. I'm looking around because I have buttons here that I want to show you. But yes, it makes a big difference to be able to control physically because it's not just the person, the tech guru in the home that knows how to control the home. It's everyone in the home that needs to be able to control the home. If you're going to replace switches, you need to have something equally good to replace it.

[02:35:31] Or better. It's a pretty good interface, right? And you want it to be better. That's the point. Yeah, but if it's not even as good, then it's just a non-starting. Yeah, so buttons are like one of the... We see a lot of really interesting elements and innovations in buttons. And you see like if you go into a really high-end home and they'll have a panel that looks like a switch but has like three different or four different buttons that are labeled. And that's essentially that concept but without needing to wire it into your home.

[02:36:00] And you can control anything in your home. Press one button and all your lights turn off and the shades go down. Press another button. So that's instead of a display. I mean, I thought that the high-end was like an iPad or a big display hanging on the wall with switches. Not really. People want physical something that clicks. Especially in homes, high-end homes. You feel it in the dark. They don't want iPads. Yeah, you need something tactile. That's the case as well. So we...

[02:36:29] And buttons have sort of been on the verge of becoming a thing in the smart home for a while but have been frustrated by interoperability because it only really works... A button only works if it works with everything in your home. It's like if I can only turn on half of my lights because these ones don't work with Apple Home and this button, you know. So how does the button know? You program the button? Yeah. You program. You have a button. Can you do multiple tabs? So, yeah, there'll be short press, long press, double press. There'll be...

[02:36:57] Yeah, so there'll be lots of different options based... Depending on which button you have, there are many, many options out there. But, yeah, it's basically something that can control another device wirelessly without being... You know, it's normally battery-powered. So... And it's... I've had... I've been on a crusade for good buttons for years. So I'm really excited. This wasn't... You're winning. Buttons weren't on my radar. They're getting there. I'm getting there. I'm getting there. I'm excited.

[02:37:24] Wait, weren't we told that removing buttons was a bold, visionary? Yeah, right. That's right. There's more buttons. Look, she's got a whole bunch of buttons. So this is the beleza. How do we say it? Oh, the beleza button. Here it is. Let's see it. No, no. They say, oh, there it is. Yeah. There it is. Sorry. So it's just... I'm still too washed out. There's no words. There's no... Controls is just on... It's just a switch. You push. So there are two. There's one on the top and one on the bottom. Okay.

[02:37:54] And this one's a fairly basic button. How do people know what the button does? They also have one that has a scroll wheel so you can raise your shades, lower your shades, turn your volume up, lower your volume. That is an issue. What it does is an issue. So if you put this on your wall, you can kind of... In your living room, you kind of assume, okay, it's a light switch. I press it and my lights turn on. I press and hold. My lights dim. You know. But some manufacturers come out with little stickers so that you can put a little sticker

[02:38:24] on it to tell you... Not in a high-end home. No. No, the high-end home... They're engraved. They actually engrave the buttons. Oh, you need a laser button engraver. Yeah. With traditional buttons, you just push the switch and see what it does. I mean, it's a lot. Who knows what this is going to do? Yeah. But this is the thing. You're replacing a switch that goes up for on or down for off. And I have to say, in some countries, it's down for on and up for off. And that's extremely confusing.

[02:38:54] Right? But that's all it could do. This can do so much more. That's the difference. Okay. Let's take... And also, this is $4, whereas the buttons you could have bought a year ago were $40. I have Lutron switches all over my house. Yeah. So you have Pico remotes. Do you have Pico remotes? I do. Those are buttons. That's a button. That's a button. There you go. Leo, you had buttons. You didn't even know. I didn't even know I had the buttons. I guess a remote is the better way of saying it.

[02:39:24] But it is... Remote kind of makes it... It diminishes the concept because you think you remote control one thing with a remote. I've lived here a year and a half. And I still haven't figured out what the buttons do. Well, Leo, go push all the buttons. It'll come. I do. I push them. Like, there's an on and an off. And then in the middle, there's an up and a down. And it's just... I'm confused. Have you tried double tapping? Double tapping. No. I didn't even know you could. Do all that. I don't think you can on the Pico, actually.

[02:39:54] Oh. It doesn't. All right. Let's take a break because you've been very good, boys and girls. And now it's time for the number one CES gadget from Father Robert. Robert? Number one, the NVIDIA Rubin. Ooh. Let's be clear. There is so much about AI, especially at CES, that is just noise in the hype cycle chamber.

[02:40:20] I ignore most of it because, well, there's only so many AI-enabled appliances and dancing robots that I can take. However, as part of my day job has me analyzing the AI landscape for significant developments, there was one CES release that caught my attention above all else. NVIDIA's announcement of their new Rubin platform and their Vera Rubin chips. The platform is actually a combination of six different components.

[02:40:43] The Vera CPU, the Rubin GPU, the NVLink 6 switch, the Connect X9 SuperNIC, the Bluefield 4 DPU, and the Spectrum 6 Ethernet switch. By tightly integrating all six components, NVIDIA has greatly reduced the bottleneck between each, enabling rack-scale integration. In layman's terms, all the silicon in a Rubin data center spends more of its time processing and less time waiting. In practical terms, Vera Rubin is 3.5 times faster than Blackwell, requires one quarter

[02:41:13] of the number of GPUs needed for LLM training, and is 10 times more efficient in inference token costs. Again, for my day job, I'm most interested in the fact that it provides eight times the amount of inference computing power per watt. While AI still requires an enormous amount of power and water for data center-scale operations, such a large increase in efficiency with a little tweaking of the silicon is an extremely welcome sign. That's it.

[02:41:39] While there was plenty of interesting tech at the show, these were my five favorite things. If you feel like I left out your favorite, feel free to reach out to me on BlueSky at PadreSJ. Till next time, I'm Father Robert Balassare, the Digital Jesuit, closing up CES 2026. Robert's entire report from CES will be available on our Twit YouTube channel on the news feed, or if you subscribe to our Twit news feed. I love the time lapse, especially the one everybody taking the picture.

[02:42:09] How did you do that, Robert? That's really cool. So that's part of the CES B-roll. Oh, it's good. I like it. The CES does provide some decent high-quality footage. That's a great footage. And I used to do my own time lapses, but theirs are top-notch. Yeah. And you don't want to leave a camera sitting there for hours anyway. That seems like a bad idea. That's not exciting. All right. We'll wrap up our CES coverage in just a little bit with Jennifer Patterson-Tui from The Verge, Jason Heiner from The Deep View at TheDeepView.com, and Father Robert Balassare,

[02:42:38] the Digital Jesuit, our show today brought to you by NetSuite. Every business is asking the same question these days. How do we make AI work for us? Possibilities are endless, but maybe guessing is a little too risky, and you certainly can't sit on the sidelines. That's an option. One thing is almost certain. Your competitors are already making their move. They're using AI. You can't wait. With NetSuite on by Oracle, you could put AI to work for you today.

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[02:44:06] That's netsuite.com. We thank NetSuite so much for supporting This Week in Tech. Well, it sounds like this was a good CES to go to. Better than in other years, Jason, you think? I mean, you know, CES is on an upswing again, certainly because of AI. I felt like there were a number of years there, maybe 2019, 2020.

[02:44:34] In 2020 was the super spreader event that likely was what spread COVID. The last CES I went to. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it really felt like CES was contracting. It was trying to find its identity and then it felt like in a sense that there was a little bit of a death blow, you know, from the COVID era and would it bounce back? But really what has happened the last few years is, I mean, the show is up over 145,000 attendees.

[02:45:00] Again, there were 4,500 vendors there. There were like over 5,000 press. So that was really the case where CES has, and there is one stat that I saw on LinkedIn, somebody in PR posted that 80% of the vendors now are either enterprise or they have consumer and enterprise. See, that's interesting because even though they don't call it that, maybe the Consumer

[02:45:29] Technology Association was smart when they said it's just CES. It doesn't stand for Consumer Electronics Show because it isn't just consumers by any means. It's not. It really has become an AI show and an enterprise show. There's a whole pavilion that's enterprise now. Obviously, the automotive piece has become a huge part of CES and has been for a while with autonomous being the key. You know, for a while there, it was focused on really electrification, but it really has

[02:45:57] moved to be almost entirely about autonomous and or the market, like the accessory market and partner market for auto. So all of that is to say that it is much more of a B2B kind of show than it's ever been. And that seems to be what has made it, you know, continue to grow and expand again.

[02:46:25] At the same time, there's still plenty of things like as as Father Robert and Jennifer have mentioned, like there's still plenty of consumer stuff to be seen, to be experienced there. This is the place that a lot of companies are now coming again to launch products, which had really been the case. That's where I was starting to wonder if it had a future because people had stopped launching products at CES. They were launching them themselves. They were launching them separately.

[02:46:51] They felt like it just got lost in the sea of things at CES. And so that's when it felt like it, you know, it was starting to lose some of its favor. But there were there were consumer companies in addition to enterprise companies actually launching things and announcing them at CES. So it does feel like it's on an upswing. It has some new energy. I don't know if it was the best CES ever. There were years where I remember there were like huge launches even 10 or 15 years ago.

[02:47:17] The I don't know if anybody remembers sort of a doomed product, but the Palm, they're essentially the successor to the Treo. What did they know? The tablet. No, it was before the tablet. The Palm. The Folio. The Palm Folio. The Palm Folio. Thank you. So that launched at CES. Right. So it was a huge one of the biggest product announcements of the year. This is like it's the Palm Pre you're talking about. Right. The Palm Pre. The Palm Pre. Yeah.

[02:47:47] I think you're right, Benito. That's what I was going to say. Yeah. I love that Pre. Yeah. I did too. If it wasn't so stinking slow and the software could not work. But remember the charger? It had this like very like this charger that was like a little stone. You just put it on like beautifully, beautifully designed product. That was a gorgeous device. Yeah. It truly was. But there's not anything like that that's happening anymore for sure.

[02:48:14] But there were a lot of things that were pretty real there. And so it is a show that is sort of regaining its momentum. It's interesting because you know who wasn't there? Apple, Intel, Microsoft. Microsoft. Intel was kind of there. Who? They partnered up. Intel. Did they have a keynote? No, but they had the wrap, the monorail. They had partner things going on.

[02:48:44] They bought ads. Actually, you know who bought all the ads? Ohio. Ohio ads were everywhere. The state of Ohio? The state of open your business in Ohio, move to Ohio. They were on every column going to the West Hall. Okay. I never, I don't really think of Ohio as next Silicon Valley, but maybe it is. Technology, Natopia. Do you remember a lot of the- There used to be a time when there was a CES blackout for two to three months before the show. You wouldn't get any news. There were no releases. Yeah. And then that started going away.

[02:49:14] I like that that's coming back. I like to be surprised at the show. You know, I remember that the down year for me was maybe 15 years ago where a quarter of the products were iPhone cases. And that was the rock bottom for me for CES. Yeah. No kidding. And like Jason, I think it's on the way up. This was better than last year. The traffic seemed to be more enthusiastic. The people were asking the right questions. Press were actually looking at things that might be future products.

[02:49:44] So, yeah, I actually walk away from most CESs thinking, eh, not much here. I thought it was interesting. Both NVIDIA and AMD made big chip announcements. Yeah. I mean, that's not where you think of them going to make those big announcements, but they did. You'd think Computex or some, but not there. Car manufacturers is there. Jennifer, it's amazing what has happened with home automation.

[02:50:11] That used to be, I remember there was a home automation pavilion in the back of the, like the South Hall or somewhere. And it was all just a tower of babble. Nobody talked to anybody else. It was ZigBee and Z-Wave and now it's starting to coalesce as a real technology platform that people are interested in. Sorry, a quick question to either of you two. Did you make it over to the foundry? Only at the very end of the show.

[02:50:40] And I, yeah, I didn't. What was the point of what were they doing? Quantum glue. Oh, yeah. So quantum computing had essentially its own pavilion in the Fontainebleau, which is like the new sort of hotel. That's the new hotel, yeah. The CES foundry is where you see AI, blockchain, and quantum innovation, they say. Right.

[02:51:08] It's kind of their blue, it's CES blue sky. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. I did. Was there a lot of quantum innovation at the foundry? There was. So we reported on this in the Deep View. So Nat Rubio-Licht wrote about this and interviewed a bunch of them, you know, and has followed the quantum thing. There are things that quantum can do. So this is another area where some of this chip stuff, it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out.

[02:51:36] Because there are things that take a lot of power, a lot of GPUs and all of that, whereas quantum can do it in an absolute fraction of the time to do it. And so there are, but these are obviously, you're not going to use it to solve math problems. You're going to use it to solve like the most, the hardest, most complex things. And so quantum is very real in terms of when, you know, it's going to be a thing.

[02:52:02] It's like anywhere from sort of one to three years, but there are, there are companies that are actually commercializing it now. So this is no longer a lab project. There are companies that are getting a lot closer. There's no longer just IBM talking about it and a couple others. It's getting pretty real. And really with AI, there's a use to put it to before we just think we used to think it was only going to be a security, a cybersecurity, you know, algorithms sort of thing.

[02:52:30] And with AI, where there being really big computational problems to solve, it's going to have a reason for being and also a reason to fund it and to make it, you know, make the ROI worth it. So anyway, we do have a, we had a, it was in our newsletter last week and there's a separate story on the deep view that details the quantum stuff. Interesting. Wow.

[02:52:53] So, yeah, I mean, that shows you that CES is still a cutting edge conference where you're going to hear about stuff that is, is actually relevant, not just new iPhone cases. There were, we didn't even talk about a lot of new PCs announced monitors. The Verge picked the LG OLED monitor, which is a beautiful lifestyle tech. I didn't talk about it at all. What? Which is the, the origin of CES is the TVs. Yeah. Oh, yeah, you're right.

[02:53:23] Normally it's all about TVs, isn't it? Yeah, the TVs, yeah. Was there any big screen that's one millimeter thinner? Woohoo! You know, I keep waiting for micro LED to happen. I think that's the next technology that, that, but I, maybe it's harder for them to get it working than people knew because they've been showing these giant micro LED screens for almost a decade now without any real consumer products. It's a great technology. I mean, Central Hall is normally nothing but screens. Right.

[02:53:52] In fact, that's where the big main entrance is and there's usually a waterfall of monitors. Well, the really interesting thing was Samsung did not have a booth on the show floor. What? Yeah, it was in the Wynn. They had, they had, they essentially had their own pavilion in the Wynn. So, and they had like a little like check-in table at, in the Central Hall where you could go and check in to go over to the Wynn.

[02:54:16] Oh, did you ride the, Elon's little underground tube to get there? They had a special Samsung shuttle. The loop. But it was, it was someone, one of the Samsung execs I spoke to said that basically they were fed up of doing it. Well, I'm not fed up, but they said they used to, so they had their big show floor booth, but then they would also have suites full of things in other areas. Yeah. So they wanted to just put everything together and they said they couldn't get a big enough space.

[02:54:46] They have so many products. Yeah. So that, so TCL took over their big space this year. Oh, interesting. Which was kind of interesting because one of the stories, our new, we've got a new TV reporter, John Higgins at The Verge, and he wrote a story about how TCL is kind of coming for Samsung and LG. Yeah. Well, they have been for a while. The Chinese manufacturers. It's funny. It, you know, it used to be American manufacturers, and then it was Japanese manufacturers, Sony.

[02:55:14] And then South Korea said, no, we can beat them. And it was Samsung and LG, which used to stand for Lucky Gold Star, and was in the back of the drugstore. And now- Then they tried to rebrand it as Life's Good. Life is Good. Life is Good. No, no, no. Life is Good. No, it's still Lucky Gold Star to me. And now it's TCL and Hisense, the Chinese companies are coming hard after these guys with lower costs, lower prices, and newer technology. Although- Well, it's all manufactured there, so yeah. Right.

[02:55:41] But my sense is that LG's panels are still widely agreed to be the best panels out there in Samsung. They're the best. Yeah. They're the best. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't talk about the Lenovo expanding laptop screen. They've got these rolling screens. The Verge picked one of the keyboard computers. Was it the HP Elite? I can't remember which one you guys liked. Yeah, people were very excited about that. I'm surprised if that idea hasn't happened sooner, honestly.

[02:56:12] It's called the Commodore. Exactly. I don't get it. We had it at the beginning. Is that for your coffee table? 2600 or 5200? Yeah. I don't get that. But at least PC manufacturers are trying new form factors, and that keeps it kind of interesting. Right now, they're just trying to get memory. That's what they're trying to do. That's right. Good luck with the RAM, kids. Wait, I was amazed to ask you about that, Padre. Wow. And they're begging. They're begging for allotments. I was asking about that, Padre.

[02:56:38] You said that little box that you got from NVIDIA has how much RAM in it? 256 gigabytes. So that's like, what, a $10,000 computer? But NVIDIA has bought all the RAM. Yeah, they bought all the RAM. I didn't say it was from NVIDIA, by the way. No. Oh, right, right, right. No, we don't know whose it was. I love my framework desktop. It was 128 gigs of RAM, and it was very pricey for that. But it would be double, probably double the cost today, which is amazing.

[02:57:05] I squirreled away about, what, half a petabyte worth of memory for some projects that I was doing. And then the memory prices went crazy. And I'm seriously considering just selling it all and banking it until the memory prices come back down. You're doing memory arbitrage, aren't you? I knew it. Oh, my goodness. RAM arbitrage. Well, I want to thank you guys. You made this a very interesting show, and you made CES sound like a very interesting event, which has, in the past, not always been easy.

[02:57:35] Thank you so much. Jennifer Patterson-Tui, senior technology reviewer at The Verge, where she covers smart home. At smart home mama on the blue sky. Your husband will probably have something to celebrate a little later on tonight. So break out some champagne. Okay. I'm just giving you a hint. My wife... In the sported light. When they... Yeah, get the buttons ready. We're ready to have a party.

[02:58:04] Break out the buttons and the little $10 speaker. Woo, we can a party. Hey. Jennifer is a regular party on Tech News Weekly with Micah Sargent every month, and we just love having you on. Thank you, Jennifer. Yeah, I'm on this Thursday, I think. So lots more CES. Oh, wonderful. Well, listen, Thursday we'll have more CES information. Maybe more buttons will make their appearance. Mr. Jason Heiner, it's always a pleasure. I really appreciate you giving us a quick preview on Wednesday on Intelligent Machines and the

[02:58:33] in-depth preview. But that's because you're the EIC at the debut. Free to subscribe. I keep asking you that. That's right. I don't understand. How does that... How can that be? I mean, it's a newsletter. That's our primary thing with about half a million subscribers. Nice. It's only been around for two and a half years. They've built something really amazing.

[02:58:56] And I left ZDNet to come to the Deep View to work on covering AI every day and to build a next generation media company. So we're a newsletter today, but also lots more to come. As usual, Jason, you're on the cutting edge. I think this is absolutely the future. Very, very exciting. Thanks for having me, Leo. Always a pleasure to see you, Mark. Always a pleasure. And Father Robert Ballas here, the digital Jesuit, Padre SJ on Blue Sky.

[02:59:25] Look for his Jesuit Pilgrimage app on iOS and Android too. And Android. And Android. Yes. You can hear my voice if you listen to enough of the stories that come through the app. Yeah. And the Flipper Zero that I gave you, don't bring that to the mayoral inauguration. Apparently, New York City's banned Flipper Zero. I just want to let you know. I saw that. And that's a little strange. Although I've disguised mine because my flipper now wears a clerical collar. Oh. Oh.

[02:59:55] It's been ordained. Well. It has been. Anything you want to plug? Anything going on in the world of Father Robert? A whole bunch going on. I just got back from the Holy Land and from the Middle East. The next couple of weeks, I'll be all over the Midwest of the United States and probably down in Puerto Rico, in Belize. Got to make a couple of stops in South America, probably heading to Venezuela. Are you on a mission? Really going to Venezuela? There's a bunch of stuff that needs to get taken care of.

[03:00:24] So, yeah. Well, my goodness. Wow. Me and for you. Yeah. Yeah. It's different. It's different. But, Leo, it's always great to come back. It feels like coming home. Yeah. We love having you on, Father Robert. All three of you. You're three of my favorite people. Catch Father Robert's full CES coverage on the Twit News feed or on YouTube.

[03:00:53] YouTube.com slash Twit News. I can't remember. But anyway, go to YouTube.com slash Twit. You can find it there. Hey, everybody. Leo Laporte here with a little bit of an ask. Every year at this time, we'd like to survey our audience to find a little bit more about you. As you may know, we respect your privacy. We don't do anything. In fact, we can't do anything to learn about who you are. And that's fine with me. I like that. But it helps us with advertising.

[03:01:21] It helps us with programming to know a little bit about those of you who are willing to tell us. Your privacy is absolutely respected. We do get your email address. But that's just in case there's an issue. We don't share that with anybody. What we do share is the aggregate information that we get from these surveys. Things like 80% of our audience buys something they heard in an ad on our shows. Or 75% of our audience are IT decision makers. Things like that are very helpful with us.

[03:01:47] When we talk to advertisers, they're also very helpful to us to understand what operating systems you use, what content you're interested in. So, enough. Let me just ask you, if you will, go to twit.tv slash survey26 and answer a few questions. It should only take you a few minutes of your time. We do this every year. It's very helpful to us. Your privacy is assured. I promise you. And, of course, if you're uncomfortable with any question or you don't want to do it at all, that's fine, too.

[03:02:14] But if you want to help us out a little bit, twit.tv slash survey26. Thank you so much. And now, back to the show. Thank you, Jennifer, Robert, Jason. Thanks to all of you. A special thanks to our Club Twit members. Without your support, we would not be around, to be frank. If you're not yet a member, please do check it out, twit.tv slash club twit. You get ad-free versions of all the shows and a lot of extras.

[03:02:42] Our AI user group is really beginning. Very interesting. I think it's some of the best AI coverage out there right now. And your support makes all that possible. Twit.tv slash club twit. We do This Week in Tech every Sunday, 1400 UTC Pacific Time. That's 1700, not UTC, 1400 Pacific Time, 1700 East Coast Time. But that is 2200 UTC. And I say that because you can watch it live.

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[03:03:42] That's for the audio only, but it's a great way to share clips if you see something you want to tell somebody about. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show also available by subscription. And it's free. Just find your favorite podcast client and subscribe. That way you'll get twit the minute it's done. Thanks to our producer and technical editor, Mr. Benito Gonzalez. Thanks to all of you for being here. And we'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can. This is amazing. This is amazing.