IFA Berlin 2026 Looked Like CES Here's the Evidence

I've been going to IFA Berlin for years, and this was the first time I walked the halls and genuinely thought: this doesn't feel like IFA anymore. It feels like CES.

For a long time, the split between the two shows was simple. CES was the everything-show, cars, robotics, health tech, and consumer electronics all under one roof. IFA was narrower and more European: TVs, appliances, phones, home tech. This year, that line got a lot blurrier. I spent five days on the show floor, and what I saw looked less like appliances-and-gadgets and more like the sprawling, category-defying mess that CES has always been.

Here's what changed my mind, who I met along the way, and why any of this matters if you're building hardware.

Exhibit One: Xiaomi Showed Up With Cars, Not Phones I landed in Berlin on the first day of the five-day show,  though I could not get a video for day one, it was also a very insightful day, my main documentation started on day 2. On Day 2, Xiaomi used IFA to show Europe its first ever electric vehicle lineup, including the SU7, the SU7 Ultra, and a Vision Gran Turismo concept car, alongside confirmation that Xiaomi EVs will officially launch in European markets in 2027. It's a genuinely unusual pivot to watch up close: a company that built its name on phones and smart home gadgets, now presenting really good, world-class EVs on the same show floor as robot vacuums and TVs.

What's most interesting here isn't just the car itself; it's the supply chain behind it. Xiaomi didn't build an EV manufacturing operation from scratch; they leaned on partnerships and their existing consumer electronics supply chain discipline (fast iteration, tight component sourcing, high-volume manufacturing experience) and pointed it at a completely different product category. That's something I see with clients constantly: manufacturing capability is transferable in ways product categories aren't. We spend our days doing a smaller-scale version of exactly this journey with the hardware founders we work with at Ardencraft: taking a product from a sharp idea to something that can actually be manufactured at volume, without the process breaking the thing that made it good in the first place. Seeing Xiaomi do it at the scale of an entire vehicle line is a useful reminder of what's possible when design, sourcing and manufacturing are treated as one connected discipline rather than three separate handoffs.

Exhibit Two: A Whole Category of Robotics Nobody Expected

By day three, I'd noticed a theme I almost walked past: exoskeletons.

Within this mobility life, alongside scooters and e-bikes, it's easy to forget that mobility shoes, exosuits, are out there. I went back for a closer look, and I wasn't imagining it. IFA Berlin 2026 turned into something close to a coming-out party for consumer exoskeletons, with at least three major entrants showing very different bets on the category:

• Hypershell unveiled the Halo, a full-leg exoskeleton coordinating four powered hip and knee joints as a single system, a step up from earlier hip-only exoskeletons, aimed at hikers and outdoor use.

• Ascentiz showed a modular platform built around a shared "Exo-Belt" core, with interchangeable hip and knee modules rather than one fixed device, letting a buyer add capability over time instead of committing to a single rigid design.

• AlpWalk took a different angle entirely with the S1, built specifically for older adults who want to stay mobile without a cane or w1alker, with clinical-grade joint precision and an optional fall-protection airbag.
  

Three companies, three completely different design philosophies, all landing at the same show. That's rarely a coincidence; it usually means the underlying component technology (motors, batteries, sensors, control software) has just crossed a threshold that makes the category viable at consumer price points. Three different exoskeleton architectures debuting at once is a genuinely good case study in a hard NPI question: do you build one do-everything product, or a modular platform? Ascentiz's bet (modular, expandable) and Hypershell's bet (fully integrated, single design) will live or die on very different manufacturing realities: modular systems are more forgiving to iterate on post-launch, but harder to manufacture cheaply at first; fully integrated designs are the opposite.

Exosuits sit exactly where I like to spend my time: hardware that has to be genuinely wearable, genuinely safe, and genuinely manufacturable, all at once. That's a much harder brief than it looks from a distance; it's the kind of product where sustainability consulting and manufacturing partner choice aren't a nice-to-have, they decide whether the thing ships at all. 

Day Four: Hardware Founders and an Award Winner

Day four is where the trade show and the community side of the week overlapped for me. I started the day in Hall 25, running into founders who'd been at the Hardware Founders mixer the night before, including two products that stuck with me. The first was AREX, whose founder I'd met the previous evening. AREX makes an AR dive mask that projects a diver's depth, no-decompression limits, and other life-support data directly into their field of view, instead of forcing them to check a wrist-mounted computer mid-dive. The mask runs the Bühlmann ZHL-16C decompression algorithm on an onboard computer, is rated to 120 metres, and is heading to Kickstarter on September 22 at a planned $1,499. They'd also picked up recognition from IFA's innovation awards during the show, a strong signal for a company that's still shipping a working prototype, not a finished retail product. The second was Auricle, whose approach to personal audio uses cartilage conduction on the ear rather than sealed earbuds or traditional bone conduction, the more accessible-focused product I mentioned, aimed at people who want awareness of their surroundings without the isolation of standard earbuds. Designed and manufactured in Copenhagen, which shows how considered the whole thing feels. 

This is exactly the stage where a lot of hardware companies stumble, not from a lack of good engineering, but from underestimating the distance between "working prototype at a trade show" and "reliable product shipping at volume." AREX's own timeline, prototype in September, crowdfunding later that month, market release targeted for Q1 2027, is a realistic runway, not a rushed one. That gap is exactly where design-for-manufacturing decisions either get made early, cheaply, or get discovered late, expensively. This was the room I felt most at home in. Both of these products started as one founder's answer to a problem they understood better than anyone, and both had to survive contact with the much harder question of how you actually build the thing, source the components, and get it into someone's hands reliably. That's the gap between "the video demo works" and "the first thousand units ship", and this is the gap Ardencraft exists to close. Day FIVE: A Half Day, and What's Next

My final day was a half-day by design. I covered the north side of the hall I hadn't reached yet, and planned to fly home that evening. That did not go as planned. A software fault at NATS, the UK's air traffic control provider, took down flight-processing capability on September 8 and triggered nearly 2,000 cancellations, with knock-on delays rippling into Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin as airlines scrambled to reposition aircraft and crews. My flight was one of them, along with a lot of other people trying to get home from the same week. So the half-day at IFA turned into a very full day stuck in Berlin, which felt like a strangely fitting way to end a week that was already full of surprises.

Looking back on the week: people say CES is bigger size-wise, but there are definitely more trade visitors at IFA. We're talking about the difference between two hundred thousand people and two hundred and fifty thousand, both very big events. IFA remains one of the largest consumer electronics shows in Europe, with only Electronica in Munich (held once every two years) in the same league regionally. But size was never really the point of what I noticed this week. It's what showed up on the floor that mattered, cars, robotics, and categories that didn't used to belong here. Next stop for me: Global Sources in Hong Kong, once I actually get out of Berlin, where I'll be seeing the manufacturing side of the industry that trade shows like IFA don't usually show you. If IFA is turning into CES, the real story isn't the show. It's every team out there building something that used to belong to a different category entirely, and now has to figure out how to manufacture it. That's the part I help with. If that's you, right now, at any stage I'd love to hear what you're building. 

The People Who Made the Week If IFA turning into CES was the theme, the people I met were the actual highlight. A quick shoutout to a few of them: Pedro Costa, CEO and Founder of Auricle, their approach to personal audio uses cartilage conduction on the ear rather than sealed earbuds or traditional bone conduction, built for people who want awareness of their surroundings without the isolation of standard earbuds. Genuinely one of the more thoughtful audio products I've seen this year.Marta Antunes, who works on marketing and brand at Auricle, the kind of considered storytelling behind their "Dare to Feel" positioning doesn't happen by accident, and it was great putting a name to the work.

Tim Aanhane of LeydenJar Technologies, their silicon anode technology packs up to 70% more energy into a battery cell without changing its physical size. If you've ever wanted more battery life without a bigger, heavier device, this is the material that actually gets you there.

The team at AREX, who I met the evening before at our Hardware Founders mixer. Their AR dive mask projects a diver's depth, no-decompression limits, and other life-support data directly into their field of view, instead of forcing them to check a wrist-mounted computer mid-dive. They picked up recognition from IFA's innovation awards during the show, well earned.

And of course, Chris Flynn, my co-host for the Hardware Founders mixer this year, same as it was in New York. Always a pleasure building this community with you. Asides hosting the show, We spent time exploring the show together and it was really great doing this.

If you're building something in hardware and want to be in the room for conversations like these, our next Hardware Founders meetup is worth knowing about and if you're further along and thinking about production, that's a conversation I'd genuinely enjoy having.

Conclusion Five days, five very different stories, and one theme running underneath all of them: the lines between hardware categories are dissolving faster than most people realize. A phone company is now a car company. A mobility aisle now includes exoskeletons instead of just scooters. A diving mask has become a piece of AR hardware, and an earbud alternative is rethinking what "personal audio" even means. None of this happened by accident, it happened because the underlying components (batteries, sensors, motors, control software) finally got good enough and cheap enough to make categories collide. The thread connecting Xiaomi's EV reveal, the exosuit arms race, and the founders showing prototypes in Hall 25 is the same one I keep coming back to in my own work: a great idea is only half the story. What separates a device that ships from one that stays a trade-show demo forever is everything that happens after the concept, sourcing, design-for-manufacturing, and the discipline to scale without losing what made the product good in the first place. That's the gap IFA doesn't show you, and it's the gap that decides who's back on this show floor next year with a shipping product instead of a prototype. IFA may be starting to look like CES. But the real opportunity isn't in the show looking bigger, it's in the growing number of teams who now have to think like hardware manufacturers, whether they started out that way or not. If that's the position you're in, I'd genuinely like to hear about it.

Frequently Asked Questions Is IFA Berlin turning into CES? Not officially, but the content on the floor increasingly overlaps. IFA has traditionally focused on TVs, appliances, phones, and home tech, while CES covered a broader mix including cars, robotics, and health tech. At IFA 2026, categories like electric vehicles and consumer exoskeletons showed up in force, blurring that historical line.

How big is IFA Berlin compared to CES? CES is larger by overall size, but IFA reportedly draws more trade visitors, roughly 250,000 compared to CES's 200,000. IFA remains one of the largest consumer electronics shows in Europe, rivaled regionally only by Electronica in Munich, which runs every two years. What's the common lesson across Xiaomi, the exosuit makers, and the founders at Hall 25? That manufacturing capability and design-for-manufacturing decisions are what separate a working prototype or demo from a product that actually ships at volume, regardless of how novel or promising the underlying idea is.