Microsoft aimed to compete with Sony's successful PlayStation console and added similar features to the Xbox, including a broadband connection and the ability to play CD-ROMs and DVD movies. The Xbox was the first console with a hard-disc drive, which presaged the modern versions of gaming consoles. (Both the current PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S lack external disc drives altogether and rely on games played from the hard disc.)
The Xbox was also massively successful, in part because of the popularity of one of its launch titles — Halo: Combat Evolved — but it never matched the popularity of its direct competitor, Sony's PlayStation 2. The Xbox versus PlayStation rivalry continues to this day, with Microsoft and Sony trading exclusive titles, buying game studios and matching one another spec for spec.
The original Xbox was the last major console announcement at CES. The show's relevance for gaming was eclipsed by E3, a competing convention in Los Angeles that attracted game developers and other hardware makers.
"That's definitely one of my biggest career failures, when we lost that segment," Shapiro says when I ask about gaming. "We made some bad decisions, and they created E3, which has gone through a life cycle of its own."
Nonetheless, CES has remained an important venue for gaming hardware debuts. PC makers, chipmakers like Nvidia and VR and AR companies, including Oculus — now folded into Meta — still debut products in Vegas. Meanwhile, big gaming companies launching consoles have opted to dribble news and rumors out over months, culminating in dedicated events like the PS5 showcase in 2020 and Nintendo Direct for the Switch 2 earlier this year.
The move toward launching important tech products at separate, company-specific events has certainly diminished the importance of CES over the years. No company illustrates that trend more than Apple.
CES 1992: Apple drops Newton, a failed precursor to the iPhoneMuch like its on-again, off-again relationship with gaming companies, CES isn't really a phone show today. That title belongs to the Mobile World Congress. Yet even the MWC plays second fiddle to the individual phone launches put on by big mobile companies: Samsung Unpacked, the Google Pixel event and, most importantly, the Apple iPhone event. That's where prospective phone buyers and tech journalists gather to get all the details about the year's newest mobile gear.
In 1992, 15 years before Steve Jobs announced the iPhone at Apple's press event, the company attended its first CES. Apple's CEO at the time was John Sculley, and the device he unveiled was called the Newton MessagePad. Sculley hailed it as "nothing less than a revolution," and it marked the computer company's first new product line since the introduction of the Macintosh.
The Newton was incredibly ambitious at that time, and it's not difficult to see a straight evolutionary line from the MessagePad to the iPhone. Apple called it a PDA, for personal digital assistant. The Newton was a handheld and portable device, dominated by a large screen, and was designed to help users take notes, organize contacts, calendars and more. It allowed people to read ebooks more than a decade before Amazon launched the Kindle. A Newton advertisement boasted: "Send faxes without paper and receive pager messages and email."
Ultimately, however, the Newton was a market failure. Its chief feature was handwriting recognition — the device could convert words written on the screen with an included stylus into text. That feature didn't work well, often failing to accurately convert even simple words to text, and was famously skewered by the Doonesbury comic strip. For a glorified notepad, the Newton itself was way too expensive, starting at $700 when it hit the market in 1993, which would be more than $1,500 today.
Other PDAs at the time included the IBM Simon and the Nokia 9000, both of which featured early cellular phone functionality. Devices like BlackBerry and handhelds running tiny mobile versions of Microsoft Windows also appeared around the mid-1990s, but early smartphones — basically, PDAs with cellular technology built in — quickly overcame them. One of the most buzzworthy products of CES 2009 was the Palm Pre, a smartphone using the company's brand-new WebOS mobile software. The Pre won CNET's Best in Show and the People's Voice Award, cementing its place in CES history.
"Palm knew exactly what it was doing using CES to launch a comeback phone with a daring new OS," recalls Jessica Dolcourt, now CNET's vice president of content, who was, at the time, an editor covering mobile technology. "It was a brilliant play that said the Pre wasn't 'just' a phone — it was as consequential and dazzling as any TV or gaming laptop."
The Pre brought something fresh and new to smartphones at a time of tremendous difference and diversity, Dolcourt says. "I could not wait to get my hands on it."
Apple, meanwhile, made sporadic appearances at CES but increasingly seemed to regard the sprawling, splashy event as a direct rival for its attention in the tech world. One of my most vivid CES memories was in 2011, when we learned that the iPhone was coming to Verizon. Apple made the massive announcement in New York during CES, completely upstaging the Vegas convention. In later years, Apple appeared at CES to discuss privacy and introduce AirPlay to TVs, among other initiatives, but none of its CES announcements could compare to the impact of the Newton.
"John Sculley was a keynote speaker," Shapiro says. "Steve Jobs never was. And when I asked him about it, he said, 'Love to keynote. Just move it to San Francisco and call it Macworld.'"
CES 2026: What's next for tech history?If there's any lesson I've learned from CES after all these years covering the show, it's that flashy tech ideas can take longer than you might expect to become a part of our everyday lives, if they do at all. In each of the cases above, the devices that were first introduced did not immediately revolutionize the market, or all by themselves. It took years and intense competition to figure out a "winner."
And they're not the only examples. I didn't mention camcorders, CDs, Windows Media Center, Blu-ray versus HD-DVD, SACD versus DVD-Audio, 4G, smartwatches or Impossible Pork.
The 2026 edition of CES is about to kick off in Vegas for the show's 59th year. As tech giants hold their own events, and innovations shift increasingly from the world of physical hardware (phones, laptops and TVs) to digital software (apps, social media and AI), the decades-old question arises: Does CES even matter anymore?
If you ask the 150,000 people expected to attend this year, the answer is beside the point. CES is here, steeped in history, and it's sure to be packed with futuristic, ambitious and weird new technology. It's almost certainly going to be around next year, too.
So I say pass the impossible lobster and point me to the flying robot AI cars.
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