Best of CES 2026 for business: our pick of the laptops, PCs, dev boxes and office improvers from the world's biggest tech show

With CES 2026 drawing to a close, it’s time for us to reveal our 13 award winners from the show. In our view, these are the most notable products for business from the 13,000 exhibitors and thousands of announcements.

We’ve split them up into six different categories to make this page easier to navigate:

Silicon sensation
Lush laptops
Power-up peripheral
Wonderful workstations
Photo phone
Office optimisers

Silicon sensation

There wasn’t a huge amount of new silicon released at CES 2026, with AMD providing only a minor set of updates to its mobile chips with the Ryzen AI 400 and Pro 400 series. CES also saw the launch of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Plus, but this is hardly a game-changer.

All of which left Intel to claim centre stage with the official launch of the Core Ultra Series 3 as part of its rather low-key press event.

Intel Core Ultra Series 3

We covered the details of the Core Ultra Series 3 and the 18A process in October last year, but this was its official launch. In particular, Intel announced that over 200 laptop and desktop PC designs will feature the CPU family.

Intel is also proud – rightly so – of its embedded GPU, with the top-end version featuring 12 Xe-cores. This GPU, we discovered, will be called the Intel Arc B390, so look out for this if gaming is important to you.

Lush laptops

It must have brought quite a smile to Intel’s lips to see the Core Ultra Series 3 powering so many new laptop designs, including five of our six “lush laptops” from CES 2026. In alphabetical order, these are the award winners.

Acer Swift 16 AI

The Acer Swift 16 AI is our pick of the five new Swift AI laptops built on Intel Core Ultra 3 Series chips. That’s primarily due to a haptic touchpad that measures 175.5 x 109.7mm and supports pen input, making it ideal for creative users. This is a powerful beast, too, topping out with Intel’s Core Ultra 9 388H processor, including the Intel Arc B390 graphics we mention above, with a 2TB PCIe Gen 5 SSD for storage. We await prices, but it goes on sale in Q1 in North America, EMEA and Australia.

Asus ExpertBook Ultra

Asus is building up an increasingly impressive family of business laptops, and the all-new ExpertBook Ultra sits at the top of the pile. Using the latest Intel Core Ultra X7 358H and X9 388H processors, it features a gorgeous 14in, 3K tandem OLED panel that goes right up to 1,400cd/m2 in HDR mode. Not only that, the ExpertBook Ultra weighs a mere 990g and measures 10.9mm thin. We are very, very much looking forward to putting this laptop to the test when it lands – but we don’t yet know when this will be or at what price.

Dell XPS 14

Shortly after apologising for its mis-step of cancelling the XPS brand in 2025, Dell announced the all-new Dell XPS 14 and XPS 16. They’re both fantastic additions to the line-up, and we’re particular fans on the 14in version thanks to its tandem OLED panel (there’s a cheaper IPS option too) and portable design. We suspect this is a laptop that will easily survive life in a bag, and Dell even promises up to 40 hours of video playback – although we’ll see about that in our tests. It’s due to go on sale in February with prices starting at $2,050 in the US.

Geekom GeekBook X16 Pro

Look out laptop makers, there’s a new name in town. Geekom, famous for its mini PCs, announced two laptops at CES: the GeekBook X14 Pro and the X16 Pro. We focus on the latter as we were so impressed at its light design, around 2.8 pounds or 1.3kg, and low $1,149 starting price, with the latter including a Core Ultra 5-125H chip (now two years old), 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. The CPU is by no means cutting edge, but the 16in IPS display looks sharp thanks to its 2,560 x 1,600 resolution. It’s shipping now in the US.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14

Read our full first-look review of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14 for full details, but here we will simply say that this is the most repairable ultraportable laptop in the world. It’s like going back to the good old days of business notebooks with their easy-to-replace batteries but in a thoroughly modern – and fast, thanks to new Intel’s Core Ultra 300 series CPUs – design. One that weighs a shade under 1kg.

MSI Stealth 16 AI+

Our final lush laptop is the MSI Stealth 16 AI+. While MSI also updated its attractive Prestige range with Core Ultra 300 chips, we wanted to focus on its all-powerful Stealth 16 AI+. At a shade under 2kg and with a 16.6mm height, It’s chunkier than others in our list, but that’s fine as its top spec marries a Core Ultra 9 386H CPU with Nvidia’s mobile RTX 5090. Juicy. The panel is Calman verified, so you can trust its colours, and while there is an RGB keyboard you can switch to classy settings when you need to impress in a business setting.

Power-up peripheral

HyperDrive Next USB4 M.2 PCIe Enclosure

Not everyone is in the position to upgrade to a new laptop with an AI accelerator, but if your computer has a USB4 port then HyperDrive reckons it has the answer. Its USB-C enclosure supports Gen4 M.2 SSDs in 2230, 2242 and 2280 sizes, but also allows you to add an AI PCIe module. The cost is high at $199, and with so much space inside we can’t help but think it could be more compact, but we love the innovative thinking.

Wonderful workstations

There were plenty of mini PC releases from AceMagic, Geekom, Lenovo and Minisforum at CES 2026, but we’re going to highlight two more powerful units that caught our eye.

Razer Forge AI Developer Workstation

Nvidia stole many headlines for its DGX Spark, a “Grace Blackwell AI supercomputer on your desk”, but our award goes to the Razer Forge AI Developer Workstation for two reasons. The first is that it supports up to four 300W, pro-level graphics cards; the second that Razer will providing its AI Kit (already available on GitHub) to make it easier for non-experts to get started. “We actually developed this with beginners in mind,” Razer told us, making this a great choice for everyone from home users to enterprises that want to experiment but may not have in-house experts. Price and availability are to be confirmed.

Lenovo ThinkCentre X TWR

If you’re on the hunt for a inference AI or engineering workhorse then consider this glorious PC. It sucks air in from the top downward, cooling the CPU, memory and trio of SSDs in one “thermal channel” and the GPU – up to an RTX 5090 – in another channel. When we spoke to Lenovo’s Zighang Na, he told us up to 145W of power could be dedicated to the Intel Core Ultra 9 CPU.

The specs also look pretty imposing, with support for four 64GB DDR5 6400 sticks for a total memory capacity of 256GB. There’s a Thunderbolt 4 port and two Ethernet ports on the rear too. We don’t yet have a price or availability, sadly, but we can tell you that it supports an external AI sensor that can detect the temperature and even your mood….

Photo phone

Honor Magic8 Pro

CES isn’t typically where companies launch phones, but Honor makes an exception with the megapixel-soaked Honor Magic8 Pro. Its trio of rear cameras provide a substantial quality upgrade over the Magic7 Pro, thanks primarily to the 200MP “Ultra Night Telescope” camera. I’ve been using it for two weeks now, and found it excels for everything from landscapes to portraits to close-up shots.

It’s backed Qualcomm’s powerful Snapdragon Elite Gen 5 platform, so it should be no surprise that using it is smoother than Casanova’s chat-up lines. This fluid feeling is helped by the 6.7in OLED panel with its dynamic 120Hz refresh rate. It’s by no means a small phone, but the battery life comfortably carried me through a hard day’s usage without needing to find a charger. You should even be able to squeeze out two hours of life.

The Magic8 Pro is available now in EMEA, with a current price of £899 in the UK – although that’s set to rise.

Office optimisers

Finally, let’s talk about the upgrades your office needs. As we walked onto CES showfloor, our eyes were inevitably drawn to huge displays proclaiming new products by Dreame. Safe to say it’s gone big at CES 2026.

Dreame V30 Cordless Stick Vacuum

Although, with the V30 Cordless Stick Vacuum, it’s arguably going small. It’s a versatile little number with incredible suction – we lifted a box with 20kg of weights using it at full 330W power – and neat features such as built-in cutters to tackle pet hair. It will also detect wall edges, at which point it will lower the end of the head to to effectively scrape debris that otherwise gathers near walls. Clever. It’s already on sale for £399 in the UK.

Dreame Dual Robotic Arm Air Conditioner X-Wind

Dreame X-Wind at CES 2026 (image: TechFinitive)

We’ve talked about the rise of robots at CES elsewhere, but here’s a different take on the idea: robotic arms that can twist into various angles to create airflows depending on where your employees are sitting. Could this finally end those in-office arguments of being too cold or too hot? The Dreame X-Wind is already on sale in China with a launch in North America scheduled for later in 2026. We believe it will sell for around $5,000.

Best of CES 2026 for business: our pick of the laptops, PCs, dev boxes and office improvers from the world’s biggest tech show