Hall 3.1, Stand 101. Messe Berlin. Somewhere between a coffee machine that learns how you take your coffee and a washing machine that judges your laundry sorting, I lost track of how many times a Haier appliance knew something about me before I did. And considering it’s Haier, I wasn’t surprised at all!
That’s the whole pitch this year: “Home of Intelligent Possibilities.” Not a slogan so much as a dare. Haier’s been the world’s No. 1 major appliance brand by global sales share for 17 straight years, and its answer to “what do you do for an encore” is apparently: make the fridge recognize your groceries by sight. So we went to the booth to see how much of that holds up when the cameras are rolling.
The Vision 15 Collection is arguably the clearest proof of the “Home of Intelligent Possibilities” idea, and it starts with a camera built into the door. AI Vision Sense watches the whole wash cycle, estimates load size, flags mixed colors before they become a laundry-day tragedy, and checks the drum isn’t empty or forgotten at the end, pinging the app if it is. Nine sensors and an AI Power Sense System handle weight, water temperature, and detergent dosing underneath, while Ultra Fresh Air Pro keeps everything smelling clean for up to 12 hours after the cycle ends. It’s a washer that pays closer attention to your clothes and that makes the entire feature comforting as well as mildly humbling, if I can rightly say so.
The Multi Care Laundry Studio is four drums stacked into one 598mm-deep unit. This might sound like a spec sheet flex but let me tell you that this is not just a single washer wondering if the darks can wait. The AI Sense feature activates the display when the user approaches, while Knock Sense and Wave Sense allow interaction with the different drums.
A 10kg washer, two 1kg drums, and an 8kg dryer share one plug and one water line. The entire unit uses one plug, one water inlet and one drain. All you have to do is operate the whole thing by knocking on it or waving at it. Tap the top drum, it opens.
Gesture at the bottom one, same deal. It’s the first appliance I’ve used at a trade show that made me feel slightly outclassed by my own hamper.
Haier’s prototype fridge, Maestro, ran a live demo that’s hard to describe without sounding like a press release, so here’s the number instead: 200 grams of meat, fully defrosted, in 10 minutes, with drip loss under 0.5%, third-party verified. That’s the AI Defrost Zone doing the work, a separate system from AI Food Care System 2.0, which handles recognizing food and recommending optimal storage elsewhere in the fridge. The defrost is the party trick, and it’s a genuinely good one.
The Horizon Collection’s Hydro Hub packs a rapid-chill zone, a self-refilling carafe, and an actual sparkling water system. The water system also comes with three carbonation levels into the fridge door. This might not seem revolutionary but somehow it is. Mostly because most of us have accepted lukewarm tap water as a permanent condition of adulthood.
AI Vision on the ID Ultimate Series 6 oven recognizes what you’re cooking, tracks it as it cooks, and stops on its own. This mostly happens once it hits the result you asked for. Paired with a 78-liter cavity and a wireless probe, it’s less “smart oven” and more a very patient assistant which should make burnt garlic bread a lot less likely.
Haier leaned hard into screen size this year, with a 163-inch Micro LED showcase anchoring the display wall. However, this isn’t the coolest part of the story –the UltraSense AI platform reads scene, sound, and lighting in real time, and the KEF collaboration on select models means the dialogue doesn’t get lost the second something explodes. Gamers get up to 240Hz DLG at 2K resolution on compatible models, for anyone whose priorities at a trade show are, correctly, refresh rate first, everything else second.
The I-Pro Clean Series 5 lineup — the Z5 washer, M5 vacuum, and R5 robot — all share a Double Roller system, two rollers moving forward and backward at once. The robot version adds LDS navigation and a camera for obstacle detection, then docks itself to recharge, empty, refill, and dry its own mop. It is, unfortunately, more self-sufficient than several humans I know.
The I-Master Specialty Coffee Machine 5 grinds, brews, and learns your adjustments over time, so the fifth cup tastes like you actually wanted the third one to. More than 30 hot and cold preparations are on offer, which is either abundance or a genuine crisis of choice, depending on how early it is.
Nothing here is a single gimmick bolted onto a normal appliance. Haier’s built an entire home’s worth of hardware that’s quietly comparing notes with itself, and at IFA 2026, you can watch it do that in real time. Worth the walk from the S-Bahn.