CES 2026 worst in show: AI girlfriends, a fridge that won't open unless you talk to it, and more

From disposable electric candy to voice-activated refrigerators without physical handles, CES was crammed full of enshittified, intrusive, insecure, and wasteful technology this year – just like it is every year. 

As regularly as bad tech shows up in Las Vegas in January, Repair.org and its allies in the repairability and tech responsibility movement were there to award a list of the worst things on display this year. 

As was the case in 2025, there's a lot of AI on this list – but not just AI. There's some literal garbage on it, too. 

Garbage you can taste, in fact

Public Interest Research Group's right to repair campaign director Nathan Proctor had an obvious choice to make when it came to the worst environmental impact: Lollipop Star. 

Literally a piece of e-waste in waiting, Lollipop Stars are suckers with an integrated battery and tiny speaker that, when placed in one's mouth, transmit sound through jaw vibrations, delivering what the brand calls "music you can taste." 

The device is non-rechargeable, gets about 60 minutes of battery life, plays a single song, and once the sucker is gone, it's garbage. 

"We need to stop making so many disposable electronics which are full of toxic chemicals, require critical minerals to produce, and can burn down waste facilities," Proctor said, noting that there are thousands of garbage fires every year due to improper disposal of batteries. 

Smart treadmill admits it can't protect your data

A Chinese company called Merach was in Las Vegas this week showing off its smart treadmill that comes with a conversational AI coach. In and of itself, that's nothing special – there's plenty of smart home fitness equipment with embedded AI available. 

As Secure Resilient Future Foundation president and Securepairs founder Paul Roberts pointed out, it's not the tech that earned the worst in show cybersecurity award this year – it's the company's outright statement that your data just isn't safe. 

"In addition to personal information, network and online behavior, financial information … Merach's treadmills are also collecting biometric data, fitness and performance data, and the inferences that can be drawn from that information," Roberts explained in a video highlighting the ignominious awardees. 

"That's not surprising, but what is surprising was the security statement," Roberts continued, pointing to the Merach's privacy policy, which includes the rather bold admission that "we cannot guarantee the security of your personal information."  

That alone, said Roberts, was enough to earn a place in the list. 

Bosch enshittifies eBikes

Tech critic Cory Doctorow, who coined the term "enshittification" to describe how once-useful tech gradually becomes worse for users in a bid to extract maximum profit, was the natural choice to present the 2026 enshittification award. He handed it out to German tech firm Bosch for its eBike antitheft system that's basically just a parts-pairing nightmare waiting to happen. 

Per Bosch, the new system allows users to report their eBikes as stolen through a mobile app, which is configured with serial numbers of the components on the bike. This naturally requires all the eBike's components to be registered to a specific user.

The catch? Bosch has total control over how parts are registered and reused. 

"Bosch can flip a switch and then you wouldn't be able to do independent repair using parts unless Bosch says they like the part that you were using," Doctorow said. "Every manufacturer that started with parts pairing said they were fighting theft and counterfeiting and ended up using it to block independent repair." 

Amazon Ring wants to make privacy a thing of the past

We reported on the downright dystopian wildfire detection feature Amazon Ring unveiled at CES this week, but that wasn't why Electronic Frontier Foundation executive director Cindy Cohn chose Ring AI as the worst in show for privacy this year. 

Citing the "sheer expansion of surveillance capabilities that [Amazon] is supporting this year," Cohn expressed concern with facial recognition in Ring cameras, commercially deployable surveillance towers, and a new app store she said is "going to let people develop even sketchier apps for the doorbell than ones that Amazon already provides." 

More surveillance, Cohn added, doesn't always make us safer. 

No one asked for an AI barista

Bosch gets a second mention on the list of the CES 2026 worst in show with its 800 Series Personal AI Barista, a coffee maker that integrates Alexa+ to brew drinks on demand and is touted as the first espresso machine in the world to be powered by Amazon's new natural language AI tech. 

The machine earned the "who asked for this" award, as – quite honestly – this sounds like more work than it's worth. 

"Adding voice control to a fancy coffee maker so you can tell it to make you a macchiato without having to learn the details" is a good idea "in theory," Consumer Reports director of technology policy Justin Brookman said. "But in reality many people don't actually want to have a conversation with their coffee maker. It's too early for that – they just want to hit a couple buttons and get a nice cup of coffee." 

In addition, as an Alexa+ device, it requires a Prime subscription, so even if you do love Alexa being your personal barista, cancelling your Prime account to save $139 a year would turn it into a simple dumb coffeemaker. And heaven forbid if Bosch decides to stop supporting it in a few years - not that such a thing has ever happened before.

Samsung's voice-activated, handleless refrigerator earns two awards

For the second year running, a smart refrigerator has earned top honors for bringing garbage tech into consumers' homes, though this time Samsung is stealing the crown from LG. 

In this case, Samsung's Family Hub Smart Fridge earns double honors for being the worst in show for repairability and the overall worst in show, largely for the same reasons.

As iFixit chief Kyle Wiens explained, the new Samsung Smart Fridge doesn't actually have any physical handles, and is opened and closed entirely by voice command, quite possibly one of the stupidest things this vulture has ever heard of.

Noisy kitchen? Good luck opening the fridge. Mechanism breaks? Good luck opening the fridge. Internet outage? You know the drill.

As Wiens noted, Samsung has a poor track record when it comes to the quality of its fridges, with touchscreens (of course there's one on this one, too), compressors, and other components regularly failing. 

Digital Right to Repair Coalition executive director Gay Gordon-Byrne said that the Samsung fridge was the worst thing she'd seen at CES this year thanks to its excessive points of failure, connectivity dependence, and the fact that Samsung is serving ads on users' refrigerators.

"The one thing a refrigerator should do is keep things cold," Gordon-Byrne said. "It needs to do that all the time; it needs to do that without difficulty."

Gordon-Byrne noted that Samsung's refrigerator is anything but that, with any number of situations leading to inaccessible food.

"These things should not interfere with your use of a very simple device," Gordon-Byrne said. ®

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