Apple ditches Macworld in favour of CES 2010?

Apple is rumoured to have inked a deal to appear at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show, with the possibility of a return by Steve Jobs to headline the opening keynote address.

The Consumer Electronics Association, which organises the annual techfest, has confirmed plans to host a special Mac area at next year’s show. Apple has yet to comment on whether it plans to participate, but the buzz is that sources inside the CEA have confirmed Apple’s starring role.

This could extend to the company laying claim to the coveted opening keynote, which is traditionally given by Bill Gates but this year fell to newly-minted Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, with equally tepid results. This in turn could be contingent on having Steve Jobs, hopefully recovered from his bout with an as-yet-unspecified illness, taking the stage.

Anyone attended both Macworld and the CES can attest which keynote is the better of the two in terms of products and energy. Apple’s Macworld address unveils product that’s exciting and almost always available right away. Microsoft’s CES spots have largely been used to hammer a captive audience with marketing – to talk up its next version of Windows, make bland announcements better suited to a press release (such as this year’s release of Windows 7 Beta 1) and to tease with future technologies which often fail to eventuate or crash and burn when they hit the market.


There have been some actual product launches, such as the debut of Windows Home Server in 2007, although the product wasn’t actually released until ten months later. Other products such as SPOT, Smart Displays and Windows CE Palmtops have become zeros rather than heroes.

Even if the CEA chose to keep Microsoft as the headline act, and thus avoid risking its massive and expensive space on the CES floor, there’s no doubt that a SteveNote scheduled on almost any day would draw a massive audience and media attention.



The four day long CES, which is slated for January 7-10 next year (with a media-only preview day on January 6), has often conflicted with Macworld dates in previous years.

One of the reasons cited by Apple for abandoning Macworld, which it bankrolls with an estimated US$25 million per year, is that Macworld’s January date forced the company into announcing show-stopping products according to a timetable at odds with its existing and preferred release schedule.

In an interview with The New York Times technology guru David Pogue, Apple’s Phil Schiller admitted that having to come up with a “dazzling” show each January was unsustainable.

Apple’s own product release cycle is dictated by key marketing seasons – the pre-Christmas holiday season (around November), the back-to-school or back-to-college educational buying season (late northern summer), the iPod product cycle (October), the iLife development cycle (usually March) and the iPhone cycle (June).

These dates largely tie up with Apple product announcements held outside of Macworld in recent years, either at its own Cupertino headquarters or at media launches in San Francisco.

So why would Apple swap one January show for another?

A move to the CES would be in keeping with Apple’s push into consumer electronics. At Macworld 2007, Steve Jobs announced the company was changing its name from Apple Computer to Apple, to better reflect its march into the broader consumer space. Jobs said that ‘traditional’ computing was just a part of the company’s overall business strategy.

“The Mac, iPod, Apple TV  and iPhone... only one of those is a computer. So we’re changing the (company’s) name” Jobs said. “We thought maybe our name should reflect this a little bit more than it does," Jobs said of the change. (Tellingly, this was also the first Macworld at which Apple announced no Mac products at all, with the show being given over to the launch of the iPhone and Apple TV).

Revolutionary products like the iPhone and of course the iPod, the company’s retail-oriented strategy of its landmark Apple Stores plus the extension of its iTunes tentacles into the boardrooms of Hollywood and New York through sales of music, TV shows and movies have all earned Apple a seat at the CE table.

Speculation also continues that Apple is working to cement its ‘digital lifestyle’ role with a home media server which would tie together Mac-based media with iTunes music and video downloads and a set-top box. Think of this as a ‘headless’ system – a combination of the Mac Mini, Time Capsule and Airport Extreme to provide Mac backup and file sharing, run background applications, schedule downloads and then distribute content to an Apple TV using 802.11n, which Apple has been baking into all its products since 2007. Content might even be streamed remotely to an iPhone logged into the home server.



Apple’s legion of fans are largely not in favour of the shift to the CES because this event isn’t open to the public. The CES remains a trade show with admission only to the industry and media, although the CES attracts thousands of mainstream press compared to the Macworld’s hundreds. And the sheer size of the CES makes Macworld look like a church fete.

In addition, CEA salespeople were busy working the floor at this year’s Macworld to spruik the 2010 CES to exhibitors, many of whom are reported to have shifted their allegiance to the Las Vegas show.

None of this bodes well for Macworld. Even before this year’s show began, organisers IDG were promoting Macworld 2010 as ‘the start of a new era’. However, the scheduled dates of January 4-8 once again cross over into the CES 2010. This isn’t a major concern for Macworld media, who have in the past attended the keynote and worked the expo floor before jetting over to Las Vegas, but it will be almost impossible for any but the largest companies to participate at both events.