CES 2026 has come and gone, and the consumer PC market is left wondering what they'll get this year. Other than high prices, RAM shortages, expensive GPUs, and a few customary motherboard refreshes. I watched all the major keynotes, from chip manufacturers like AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm, and most of the OEM presentations, as I do every year. I'm normally excited afterward, because new technology will never not be interesting to me, but I can't help feeling let down by the industry this year.

Laptops were already expensive, and now they're several hundred dollars more each, because one company bought all the future RAM wafers. An AMD executive said they reckon people will make minor upgrades this year rather than build new PCs. It's a bad year when Apple's historically high RAM upgrade costs look competitive, but here we are. But with all the gloom out of CES, I'm genuinely excited about one chipmaker's products, and that's Qualcomm.

The chipmakers forgot what the "C" in CES stands for

Releasing datacenter GPUs that nobody can buy benefits is a slap to the face

All the major chipmakers had keynote presentations at CES 2026, and I can't shake the feeling that most of them have forgotten what it's like to sell to retail customers. And why would they? RAM orders are booked until 2030 or so, GPUs are pre-sold to datacenter customers, and large OEMs are taking the rest for laptops and prebuilts. It's a bad time to be a PC enthusiast, which is a crying shame because the underlying technology has never been better.

As for those keynotes, well, AI was everywhere (except for in Dell's, where they apologized for going AI PC-heavy). AMD said the word AI twice a minute while showing off its new AI-focused datacenter GPUs and Ryzen AI 400 APUs for laptop use. You'd expect Nvidia to outperform that, but only a sedate 1.6 times per minute was the score while showing off datacenter racks. Intel was less AI-centric, but still 1.3 times per minute. There's one word that was conspicuously absent in all three keynotes: gaming. Nvidia didn't mention it at all, and AMD and Intel said it three times each.

The "C" in CES is Consumer, or at least it's supposed to be, not Corporate, Client, or Cloud. This is the first CES in years that AMD or Nvidia didn't talk about a new GPU architecture or a refreshed line of existing cards. The first where gaming took a back seat, and the spending power of the datacenter reigned supreme.

Sure, Computex in the summer is when desktop CPUs are usually announced, so I didn't expect to see them at CES, although AMD did tease the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, which is releasing fairly soon. But to see so many keynotes focus on enterprise clients feels like a snub to the enthusiasts that buy DIY PC components every year, and I hope future keynotes do something to address the balance.

More laptop chips aren't what enthusiasts want either

Intel's Panther Lake Core Ultra Series 3 laptop chips technically take over from Lunar Lake, although since that didn't have any H-series chips, it's closer to a replacement for Arrow Lake in my eyes. It's also a mobile-only release, and we'll have to wait until later this year to see what Nova Lake brings and what the enthusiast desktop chips will look like. Some mobile chips for handhelds were also teased, but those should be a secondary concern to desktop gamers. And AMD's refreshed Ryzen AI series seems like a minor CPU frequency boost over current-gen, with little to shout about on the iGPU side.

Let's be real, these are laptops for enterprise purchasing departments to order by the hundreds. When Windows-based laptops are more expensive than MacBooks, which are you going to choose with your hard-earned money? I know my choice, and it'll be Apple all day, every day.

Qualcomm hasn't forsaken the consumer market

Or any other market segment

Several Qualcomm-powered devices made our Best of CES 2026 list, and I'm genuinely excited to get hands-on experience as they launch and make their way to our testing benches. I love that Qualcomm is firmly aiming at the mid-range of devices, where the bulk of consumer tech is sold. Whether it's long-lasting battery life on laptops or mini PCs that sip power while you work, 2026 is looking like only one company is trying to serve consumers, rather than pushing to impress datacenter clients.

Amusingly, this might also mean the year Copilot+ becomes mainstream, since it was previously locked behind premium laptops. AI is going to be low on the priorities for consumer device purchases, but if it's coming and affordable, it's hard to say no. And with Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite coming to laptops, AIO PCs, and likely mini PCs, they're going to be on more desks than ever.

Discrete GPU support is needed

The big drawback of Qualcomm PCs right now is limited (or none) support for discrete graphics cards. Minisforum has one mini PC with an Arm-based processor that can run dGPUs in Linux, but support is flaky at best, and it won't work with Windows on Arm because there are no drivers.

Which is a shame, because we know Nvidia's GPU IP works on Arm. The Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 use that combination, as do Nvidia's Grace supercomputers. It'll take GPU makers to deliver working drivers for Arm for this to change, but I live in hope as the market share of Arm-based devices increases.

RAM is going to be a problem still

Whatever devices are released in 2026, they're all going to be more expensive because RAM is nowhere to be found. This will be one of the first years in recent memory where prebuilt PCs and laptops might be the affordable way to get large amounts of system RAM, which is no good for the enthusiast crowd and the hopes of both AMD and Intel as desktop CPUs launch throughout the year.

Qualcomm (and Arm) is going from strength to strength

All told, it was a pretty dismal CES for the enthusiast crowd, but Qualcomm's focus on affordable devices offers a glimmer of hope for me. The compatibility issues with Windows on Arm are mostly gone, and all I want to see this year is working GPU drivers and Linux support. It would be fantastic if I could pick up any ARM-based laptop this year and sling my favorite Linux distribution of the time on it, but I'm not sure it will happen.