Every January, CES hands the technology industry a mirror; the Worst in Show awards hold up the unflattering side. The repair-advocacy coalition behind the anti-awards has announced its 2026 winners — products judged the most harmful, invasive, wasteful or unfixable on display — in a ceremony hosted by maker and YouTuber Simone Giertz and covered by iFixit’s report on the awards. The tone is comic, but the criteria are serious: privacy, repairability, environmental impact and simple usefulness.
Worst in Show: The Dishonour Roll
The Privacy award went to Amazon Ring AI, criticised for expanding the reach and ambition of consumer surveillance through new AI features on its cameras and doorbells. Environmental Impact went to the Lollipop Star, a disposable electronic lollipop that plays music through jaw vibrations — ‘music you can taste’, and e-waste you cannot recycle. The ‘Who Asked for This?’ prize landed on Bosch’s 800 Series Personal AI Barista, faulted for injecting voice assistants, subscriptions and planned feature decay into a coffee machine. Two Bosch products in total were singled out for turning everyday convenience into subscription bait and lock-in.
Overall Worst: The Fridge
The top dishonour, Overall Worst in Show, went to Samsung’s Family Hub smart refrigerator — the ‘open sesame’ fridge, as the judges dubbed it — for the mismatch between what a refrigerator is for and what this one demands: complexity, connectivity and advertising between the user and their leftovers. The verdict echoes a wider consumer frustration documented in coverage of how phishing and online fraud have matured: the connected home keeps adding attack surfaces and obligations faster than it adds value.
Why an Anti-Award Matters
Worst in Show is organised by Repair.org with backing from right-to-repair and consumer advocates, and its voting for the People’s Choice award continues with support from Back Market. Its influence is cultural rather than regulatory, but manufacturers notice: past ‘winners’ have quietly redesigned features, and the awards give journalists a vocabulary — subscription bait, feature decay, surveillance creep — for problems buyers feel but cannot name.
The awards also highlight a tension inside the industry itself: many engineers privately share the judges’ frustrations with subscription creep and glued-shut hardware. Repair advocates argue that design choices follow incentives — as long as services revenue rewards lock-in, products will keep drifting that way — which is why the coalition pairs its mockery with policy campaigns for repairability scoring and parts availability in shops.
In a launch season of folding phones and AI everything, the anti-awards perform a useful service. They insist that the question is not only what a gadget can do, but what it costs in money, privacy, repairability and waste to own — a standard the industry’s best products should be happy to meet.
