Advent Blog

Apple’s recent announce­ment that 2009 would be its last appear­ance at the annual MacWorld show has sparked much hand-wringing and spec­u­la­tion. After all, MacWorld has been the plat­form of choice for many of Apple’s most famous prod­uct launches, includ­ing the iPhone at the 2007 show.

The coin­ci­dent announce­ment that Steve Jobs, Apple’s iconic CEO, would not be giv­ing the keynote address for health rea­sons ignited even more angst and rumor-mongering, bor­der­ing on the “Paul is dead” Beatle con­spir­acy hys­te­ria from an ear­lier generation.

“What does Apple’s pull-back mean???! Does this mean Apple doesn’t believe in trade shows? Will I ever get to see Steve again?”

The pun­dits and fan­boys should take a deep breath…

The crit­i­cal piece of infor­ma­tion miss­ing in all this blub­ber­ing is the hint that Apple may have a sig­nif­i­cant pres­ence at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). CES usu­ally hap­pens about a week after MacWorld. CES is where Microsoft, Sony, Dell, Nintendo, and a host of oth­ers make their big announce­ments each year.

Apple has usu­ally ignored CES, and instead focused its atten­tion on being the big fish in the smaller pond of MacWorld. However, Apple’s announce­ments have increas­ingly over­shad­owed the news com­ing out of CES to the point where Apple may be ready to make the jump to the big­ger pond. If Apple can use its mar­ket­ing prowess to dom­i­nate the world’s atten­tion in its com­pe­ti­tions’ back yard, then it will suck up a lot of the avail­able oxy­gen (press cov­er­age) at the show. That’s a com­pet­i­tive move that seems to fit with Apple’s DNA.

Since Apple makes great use of secrecy, I guess we’ll have to wait and see. What do you think?