In the world of sports, sometimes it's easier to impress by not playing. When you're in the game, everything you do is judged and all your mistakes happen in the spotlight. But let yourself fall behind another poor guy who is now set apart for their mistakes, you will find that all is forgiven…or, better yet, forgotten. Let's get David Price back in the game, they'll say. I'm sure we were wrong about him being physically incompetent and afraid of the ball.
I often wonder if some variation of this mindset is what leads Apple to snub trade shows and conferences when it has the resources to attend every event on the planet if it wants. Plenty of new tech products debuted at CES in Las Vegas this month, for example, but there were none from the industry's hottest brand. And yet, in their absence, Apple products still received the most positive media coverage.
Take poor old Dell, which announced at CES a major rebranding for its PC lines. Instead of XPS, Inspiron and Latitude, the company's machines will be branded Dell, Dell Pro and Dell Pro Max, terms familiar to customers because they are inspired, shall we say charitably, by the iPhone. The result? Mockery for Dell and a bunch of headlines that hype Apple products and make the Cupertino company look like a pioneer.
I rather sympathize with Dell, who clearly made a mistake and doesn't seem to know how to fix it. Apple tends to take very difficult and complicated things and make them easy and simple. When competitors follow suit, they trip over their shoelaces by adding, in this case, unnecessarily complicated sub-brands like Plus and Premium. In any case, simplicity does not depend on the choice of words, but on the fundamental structure of your product portfolio. (As an aside, Apple doesn't always get it right. But of course, its mistakes are forgotten when someone else is in the spotlight.)
Nvidia, meanwhile, was doing its own Apple impersonation elsewhere in Las Vegas: the company's Project Digits supercomputer had barely landed on the CES show floor before being described as a Mac mini clone, and not without reason. It's much more powerful (and therefore much more expensive) than the Mac mini, but the handheld's design is extremely familiar, as is the emphasis on AI. And it would be hard to imagine that the words “Like a Mac mini, except…” weren't uttered at some point in its development cycle.
Nvidia
Even some of the more positive headlines have been marred, for Apple's rivals, by disparaging comparisons to the absent giant. Asus nailed just about everything with the Zenbook A14, but suffered the indignity of seeing it billed as a mere “MacBook Air competitor.” The company, in fact, lived up to the comparison, joking that it had considered the name Zenbook Air. But I still consider this strategy, known in movies and TV shows as lampshading, to be cheating. Joking that your design isn't original doesn't change the fact that it is.
Whether they're willing to admit it or not, Apple's rivals spent much of CES 2025 trying to copy its moves. Instead of using its absence from the series as an opportunity to present something different, they delivered the same thing, only with PC chips, lower quality software, and disastrous branding. While Apple received a bunch of uncritical PR without doing anything.
It's often said that Apple doesn't innovate from scratch. Instead, it bides its time and lets other companies create a market before swooping in at the crucial moment and grabbing the revenue. I agree that the company is rarely the first to enter a market. But what he often does is create the first iconic product in a market, one that defines what that market represents in the popular consciousness – and, too often, in the minds of its competitors as well. After the launch of an iPhone or MacBook Air, competitors find it hard to imagine an alternative that doesn't start with Apple's offering and then go from there.
The irony is that if companies really wanted to be like Apple, their best bet would be not to show up at CES at all. But when the star player is away, it's just too tempting to rush onto the field and do your best to impress the fans.
