Apple is not at CES but its shadow is
Apple, as usual, does not have a physical presence at CES in Las Vegas. Nevertheless, the reigning king of personal electronic devices somehow overshadows everyone else at the annual electronics Mecca.
The Consumer Electronics Show, held annually in Las Vegas, is the place where every manufacturer of electronic devices shows up to hawk its goods every January. Well, every major manufacturer except one: Apple. The maker of the iPod, the iPad, the iPhone, and the MacBook Air is not at CES this year, just as they are not at CES every year. Somehow, that does not matter. They are being talked about, and thought abut, in every nook and cranny of the giant electronics show, from the keynotes to the show floor to the private parties in the huge Las Vegas suites, according to an LATimes story.
The non-presence of Apple at CES is quite palpable. Yair Reiner, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., explains it this way: “Apple is the phantom haunting CES. The show is supposed to be about new and innovative products, but to a large extent what you’re going to see is the rest of the electronics world trying to catch up to what Apple is already doing.” That means that there will be a lot of clones of the iPhone, powered mainly by Android. And there will be lots of new clones of the iPad, powered mainly by Android. But there probably will not be anything new or innovative in those areas because, sing it with me now, Apple is not here.
All of those hundreds and hundreds of mobile devices powered by Android begin to remind one of Campbell’s soup. Campbell’s manages to get the job done, more or less, although they are not nearly the best soups, just the plainest and most numerous. And at some level, all those Android devices, which will be made to look so glitzy in Vegas, will have an effect in the marketplace. When you flood a marketplace with anything, even Campbell’s soup, someone is going to buy it.
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January 6th, 2011
Yes.. it’s simply because all the ‘new’ devices are clones of the Apple platform… none of them understood how to do tablet GUI, nor the OS until Apple had done it… Yes MS did it but all they did was port Windows onto a touch panel… Additionally when you look at a fair chunk of them, they even copy the form factor… HP/Compac even copy the MBP form factor now… it’s a joke on their part… The reverse engineers in those companies work around the clock picking apart Apple products… and as Steve put it so well… They have no culture in design… no discipline… no initiative… they spend all their R&D on reverse engineering each other, and patent trolling lawyers…
End of line…