Apple again dominates CES without even showing up
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Apple and CES 2025 logos -- image credit: Apple and CES. Last updated 12 hours ago. It's not true that Apple has always shunned the Consumer Electronics Show, but in 2025 it is yet again the most dominant company at the event, despite not being there. Apple's disregard of CES is so well known that it was headline news in 2020 when it was claimed that the company was attending it again. But Apple didn't exhibit anything, didn't launch anything, and it didn't have a stand.
It was only there to take a stance instead. In that 2020 CES, Apple's then senior director of global privacy, took part in a panel on the subject. Jane Horvath said everything you would expect Apple's privacy chief to say, and then the panel was over. So with no offense to Horvath or CES, this was not Apple really attending the show in 2020. It was the firm's head of privacy doing the rounds of talks and panels on her subject.
You actually have to go back to the early '90s to find when Apple bothered to show up to CES properly. John Sculley unveiled the Newton MessagePad at the May 1992 version in Chicago. We all know how that ended up. It didn't seem so at the time, it instead seemed like Apple making a hugely successful announcement. But Sculley announced it far, far too early.
This is actually key to why Apple will not attend CES — and why it ceased attending Macworld Expo after 2009. That's also why Macworld Expo died, after limping on for five further years. From Apple's perspective, it no longer wanted to be tied to another firm's or another event's timetable for its announcements.
