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This year, over 4,000 exhibitors descended on Las Vegas, Nevada to showcase their wares at CES, and the Engadget team was out in full force. The week started with press conferences from the biggest companies at the show, which were often a flurry of AI buzzwords, vague promises and very little in the way of hard news.
More than one company even decided to forgo announcing things during their conferences to make way for more AI chatter, only to publish press releases later quietly admitting that, yes, actually, they did make some consumer technology. It's appropriate, I guess, that as we're beginning to feel the knock-on cost effects of the AI industry's insatiable appetite for compute resources — higher utility bills and device prices — companies would rather use their flashy conferences to reinforce AI's supposedly must-have attributes rather than actually inform the public about their new products.
We're by no means AI luddites at Engadget, but it's fair to say that our team is more excited by tangible products that enrich our lives than iterative improvements to large language models. So, away from all of the bombast of NVIDIA's marathon keynote and Lenovo's somehow simultaneously gaudy and dull Sphere show, it's been a pleasure to evaluate the crowd of weird new gadgets, appliances, toys and robots vying for our attention.
Over the course of several days of exhaustive discussion and impassioned pitching, our CES team has whittled down the hundreds of products we saw to pick our favorites. Starting with an initial shortlist of around 50 candidates across a diverse range of product categories, we eventu
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 Apple CEO Tim Cook earned $74.3 million in 2025, down slightly from $74.6 million in 2024, Apple said in its annual proxy filing released today.
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 iOS 26 is showing unusually slow adoption among iPhone users months after release, according to third-party analytics.
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 With Tim Cook having recently turned 65 years old and a number of other senior Apple executives having already departed in recent months or heading for the exits, there has been significant focus on Apple's plans for who will succeed Cook as CEO.
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Have you ever wanted to save approximately three seconds and two mouse clicks when shopping online? Microsoft has something special just for you. The company just introduced something called Copilot Checkout at the NRF 2026 retail conference. This is exactly what it sounds like. It's a shopping assistant embedded within Copilot.
The feature is rolling out now in the US and integrates with PayPal, Shopify, Stripe and Etsy. It lets people complete purchases directly inside of Copilot without having to withstand the grueling experience of being redirected to a retailer's website. Participating partners include Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie and Ashley Furniture.
The retailers remain the actual merchant of record, so they'll still get customer data and all of that jazz. Microsoft controls the interface.
We don't know what kind of safeguards are in place to prevent the AI from hallucinating its way into buying you a giant bounce house when you wanted to order some Bounce dryer sheets. Engadget has reached out to Microsoft to inquire about these safeguards and how exactly the money is handled.
This is a pretty big moment for AI shopping. OpenAI introduced a shopping assistant several months ago that
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The latest test version of Copilot in Edge includes a "Browser Actions" toggle, which gives Copilot access to your Edge profile—that includes logins, saved passwords, browsing history, and cookies. This allows the AI assistant to effectively act as you on your behalf to launch pages, click on links, and fill out forms without annoying login prompts.
Another new feature is called "Journeys," which allows Copilot to analyze the last seven days of your browsing history to create summaries and "cards" on the new tab page. Microsoft emphasizes that all your data is kept local and isn't used for AI training or advertising purposes. However, the feature does require a Microsoft account.
Microsoft also emphasizes that Copilot can't control Windows outside the Edge browser or bypass passwords and two-factor authentication. You must authorize access and manually send tabs to Copilot. It isn't yet clear when this deeper integration will be released in full.
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