Repair Advocates Name CES 2026’s Most Anticonsumer Tech

The Repair Association is a U.S. advocacy group fighting for customers’ “Right to Repair.” If you buy something, you should be able to repair it, the organization argues. It’s an idea that consumer and industrial manufacturing companies are increasingly reluctant to support.

For the fifth year in a row, Repair.org held its own high-profile annual event calling out the “Worst in CES,” an awareness-raising exercise designed to hijack a share of the media’s attention of the world’s largest consumer electronics show, held each year in January.

The event had input from prominent consumer groups like Consumer Reports, PIRG, the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) and iFixit, with the goal of showcasing “the least private, least secure, least repairable, and least sustainable gadgets” at CES.

“It strikes me that CES is more marketing hype than ever before,” said Gay Gordon-Byrne, the executive director of the Repair Association, at the Consumer Electronics Show 2026. “Many products are being announced that do not yet exist — so most basic consumer questions cannot be asked or answered.”

“Right to Repair laws are in effect in 11 states, so it surprises me that OEMs do not even mention repairability,” he said.

This means that despite CES’s reputation as the coming-out ceremony for the year’s shiniest new technologies, “Very little innovation is being presented other than increasing the speeds and feeds of new chips. Does a faster chip make a difference for telling time or playing music? Seems very banal to me.”

The Problem With Disposable Electronics

At the event, Nathan Proctor, the head of the consumer advocacy group PIRG’s right-to-repair campaign, decried “the absolutely sinful morass of disposable battery-powered products,” a leading cause of fires at America’s waste facilities.

And then he recognized one battery-powered product that “stands out for its sheer absurdity” — a single-use electronic lollipop, from Lava Brand, that, as Proctor puts it, “plays a song, transmitted through vibrations in your jaw.” A video from Engadget notes each one will retail for $8 or $9, and that the electronics-laden stick is not reusable. Proctor used this product to deliver a clear message.

“We need to stop making so many disposable electronics which are full of toxic chemicals, require critical minerals to produce and can burn down the waste facilities,” Proctor said.

There was at least one product that the organizers actually liked and called to our attention: Lenovo introduced a laptop with a modular chassis that was much more serviceable than regular laptops.

PC Magazine hailed it as “Lenovo’s most repairable ultraportable yet,” noting the battery, speakers, cooling fans and keyboards are all modular, making it “easily the most repairable and upgradable ultraportable ThinkPad to date.”

The Repair Association’s executive director told The New Stack this was a product “which we like and want to support.”

The ‘Enshittification’ Award and Its Implications

This year, there was a special new award recognizing the product showing the greatest “enshittification,” a term coined by author/EFF activist Cory Doctorow to describe how tech companies can relentlessly abuse their control of a platform or product.

Doctorow appeared in the ceremony to criticize a complex antitheft system added to e-bikes from Bosch with some serious repairability implications. The parts of the system “pair” — checking first against a database of stolen parts — which could lead to “false positives” (e.g., a part bought at a police auction), Doctorow believes.

Doctorow said the question becomes: Who do you trust less? Sure, a bike thief could swipe your bike, but another threat is Bosch, “who gets to call the cops on you if you fix a bike in a way that they don’t like.”

And Bosch threatens consumers in another way, Doctorow asserted. Like those printers that stop working if you use a competitor’s ink cartridge, “At any time, Bosch can flip a switch, and then you wouldn’t be able to do independent repair using parts unless Bosch said that they like the part that you were using.”

Doctorow shares some hard, cold reality. “Every manufacturer that started with parts pairing said that they were fighting theft and counterfeiting and ended up using it to block independent repair.” So using his own terminology, Doctorow declared this product the “Worst in Enshittification.”

Doctorow followed the implications of Bosch’s part-watching technology to one possible logical extreme. Since 1998, circumventing copyright protections has been a felony in the U.S., with a five-year prison sentence — and if those were applied to Bosch’s antitheft system, Doctorow believes, “You go to jail for longer for fixing your bike than you would for stealing the bike!”

In fact, earlier in the week, the Repair Association’s Gordon-Byrne told The New Stack that with the lack of consideration for repairability and other customer-centric innovations at CES, she’d wanted to suggest calling it the “Consumer Enshittification Show.” (But she “had trouble framing it without being insulting.”)

Worst in Privacy and Security at CES 2026

At the event, EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn warned of “privacy-invasive technologies,” recognizing Amazon’s Ring doorbell systems as particularly egregious. It’s not just filming your doorstep, Cohn says, but now has added facial recognition features and even mobile surveillance towers “that can be deployed at parking lots and other places.” And if that weren’t enough, Cohn said, Amazon also announced a companion app store “that’s going to let people develop even sketchier apps for the doorbell than the ones that Amazon already provides.”

So Ring doorbells win 2026’s award “for the sheer expansion of surveillance capabilities they’re supporting this year,” Cohn says, “for doubling down on privacy invasion — and supporting the misconception that more surveillance always makes us safer.”

And for “Security,” the Worst in Show came from a China-based company for the second year in a row.

Paul Roberts, founder of Secure Repairs, recognized an exercise treadmill from Merach with a built-in AI “coach” for its surprising variety of security concerns. It collects financial and personal information. It collects information about your online behavior and your network. It collects biometric data plus fitness and performance data. But then Roberts warned that, according to the company’s privacy policy, it’s also collecting “the inferences that can be drawn from that information.”

And then further down, Merach accompanies all that data collection with this startling point-blank admission:

“We cannot guarantee the security of your personal information.”

The Least Repairable and Overall Worst Product

The worst for repairability was a smart refrigerator from Samsung, with iFixit cofounder Kyle Wiens noting Samsung already has a history of problems with its refrigerators’ compressors, ice makers and touchscreens. So he’s leery of Samsung’s newest “smart” refrigerator, because it ships with no handles — with Samsung trusting that its built-in AI functionality will always be ready and available to recognize voice commands for swinging open a door.

“I would not trust a Samsung fridge farther than I could throw it,” Wiens joked, “which is why you shouldn’t trust it with your family’s food.”

Gordon-Byrne appeared later in the presentation to deliver the verdict for the overall Worst in Show product. “We argued a lot,” she says — but there was a broad dislike for that refrigerator that swings open on command. They felt that a refrigerator door should just stay closed and keep your food closed — without swinging open at the sound of the wrong background noises or glitching if there’s an internet disruption or a power supply issue. And when approaching that refrigerator door, does anyone really want to see ads?! That’s even before the final concern: “Who’s keeping track of where the data goes?”

It garnered the overall Worst in Show choice because when you weigh all the cons against the pros, said Gordon-Byrne, “Fundamentally, why do you want this thing?”

The ‘Who Asked for This?’ Award for Unnecessary Tech

Consumer Reports sent Justin Brookman, their director of technology policy, to deliver the infamous “Who Asked For This?” award to an espresso maker with voice controls from Amazon’s Alexa Plus. Brookman notes wearily that “in reality, many people don’t actually want to have a conversation with their coffee maker. It’s too early for that.”

And it’s not just that Brookman sees Alexa as “a buggy and inconsistent assistant that requires a Prime subscription or a monthly fee,” for a coffee maker that already retails on Amazon for $1,445.

The real issue is the tech industry’s penchant for expensive products “that lose key features without warning.” So looming over this coffeemaker is the threat of a day when the manufacturer “doesn’t want to support Alexa on the coffee maker anymore and the feature will be disabled. If your fellow coffee enthusiasts aren’t actually using the personal AI barista feature, it might just be gone tomorrow!”

And for the Worst in Show people’s choice award, NowThis Editor-in-Chief Michael Vito Valentino selected the Lepro’s creepy woman-in-a-glass-case “AI companion,” called AMI.

CES 2026 worst in show: AI girlfriends, a fridge that won’t open unless you talk to it, and more securitytc.com/TQFqhk

— Eric Vanderburg, Jan. 9, 2026

Maybe it’s all proof that despite the ambitions of the Consumer Electronics Show, it’s the repair advocates who are truly thinking about the best interests of consumers. Their lively show was hosted by YouTube tech experimenter Simone Giertz, who came up with possibly the best description for awards recognizing the very worst in security, privacy, environmental impact and repairability.

In the end, they’re the trophies that “nobody should want.”

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