Look, I am all for progress. I like fast internet and phones that don’t die in four hours as much as the next person. But after looking at the "innovation" coming out of CES 2026 this week, I have to ask: Has the tech industry collectively lost its mind?
This blog entry is going to be a little more of a rant than usual. I'm just in one of those moods. You have been warned.
It feels like we have moved past solving actual human problems and entered a phase of pure, unadulterated absurdity. We aren’t inventing the future anymore; we are just gluing Wi-Fi chips to random household objects and hoping some venture capitalist or bored consumer falls for it.
Hearing Music Through Your Teeth?
Take the Lollipop Star. This is a real product that people spent real money to develop. It is a nine dollar lollipop that uses bone conduction to play music inside your skull while you eat it.
Who asked for this? Was there a focus group of people saying, "I love sugar, but I really wish I could hear a true crime podcast vibrating through my molars at the same time"? It is the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a dystopian movie about the collapse of society, yet here it is, available in strawberry and blue raspberry.
Your Bedding Is Judging You
Then we have the AI-powered pillow. This thing is designed to detect your snoring and gently nudge you until you shift positions. On paper, sure, save the marriage. In reality, it is a five hundred dollar bag of foam that spends the entire night judging your respiratory system.
It even generates a weekly "Sleep Efficiency Report." I do not know about you, but the last thing I want on a Monday morning is a passive-aggressive email from my bedding telling me I failed at being unconscious.
Chainsaws with Espresso
The absolute peak of the madness, though, is the vibrating chef's knife. It supposedly uses haptic feedback to tell you if you are slicing at the wrong angle. Think about that. We took a sharp, dangerous blade and decided the best way to make it "smart" was to add unpredictable motorized shaking. It is like trying to improve a chainsaw by giving it a shot of espresso and a bad attitude.
The Cyber Nightmare of Smart Spoons
Since I usually talk about security here, I can't help but look at the fine print. Every single one of these gadgets requires an account. Every one of them wants to live on your home network and sync to the cloud. We are building a world where your kitchen utensils have more permissions than your actual employees.
I can already see the future headlines. Your smart spoon gets conscripted into a botnet to help a teenager in Latvia D-DoS a government agency. Or better yet, your smart chair locks you into a rigid, upright position because you forgot to pay your nine dollar monthly "Spine Plus" subscription. It isn't just annoying; it is a massive attack surface disguised as convenience.
The Subscription for Your Spine
It feels like we have reached a point of "Solutionism" where companies are inventing complex, hackable answers to questions nobody ever asked. We used to look at these shows for the next big leap in processing power or a revolutionary display. Now, we just watch startups spend millions of dollars trying to reinvent the concept of a rock.
My advice? If it needs a firmware update to help you eat, sleep, or cut a carrot, you probably don't need it. I am sticking with my manual toothbrush. It doesn't have an API, it doesn't track my data, and it has never once asked me to agree to a new set of Terms and Conditions just to clean my teeth.
Are you ready to let a piece of candy play Spotify in your jaw, or have we finally hit the limit of what we are willing to plug in?
Want more silly rants like this? Here you go:
https://michaelroberts.me/blog
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