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Why Macworld will upstage CES again
Sorry for the dearth of posts lately, the Mac Inspector's alter ego was sent out to the Nevada desert to cover something called "CES." It's this little get together that happens every year in January. Most of us don't pay it much attention, because MacWorld SF occurs around the same time.
CES is the single biggest tech trade show in the US. This year, 140,000 people jammed the hotels, convention centers, and taxis of Las Vegas to check out the coolest products in the consumer electronics world. Well, most of them at least.
Apple is conspicuously absent from CES, due to its close proximity to the Macworld expo. This simple fact has had a huge impact in recent years as it has turned what was once a niche trade show into a must-see event for the biggest media outlets in the world.
At no point was this more evident than last year. While 112,000 were at CES looking hungrily for the next big thing, Steve Jobs dropped the news cycle bomb that was the iPhone. Suddenly, the crowds in Vegas were sent scrambling to phones, computers, and TV screens to figure out just what the hell had happened. Suddenly, the Las Vegas Convention Center wasn't the center of the tech world, despite nearly every company of relevance being there to show off their latest and greatest.
Expect the same thing to happen this year. Both Microsoft and Intel failed to blow anyone away, filling their keynotes with cheesy demos and celebrity cameos rather than any sort of earth shattering announcement. In fact, the star of the show thus far seems to be the Asus EeePC. Members of the trade press have had to compete with the likes of CBS to get camera time with the little notebook.
If Apple does announce its own ultra-mobile notebook on Monday, and if half the rumors about it are true, even the EeePC could be forgotten by the masses.
Perhaps in January the media should start paying less attention to the convention center in Vegas and more attention to the one in San Francisco.
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