CES, start your photocopiers: Hey, it’s cool to copy Apple again!

In the world of sports, it’s sometimes easier to impress by not playing. When you’re in the game, everything you do is judged and all your mistakes happen under a harsh spotlight. But get yourself dropped behind some other poor bloke now getting picked apart for their mistakes, you’ll 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 variant 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. Lots of new tech products made their debut at CES in Las Vegas this month, for example, but there were none at all by the industry’s highest-profile brand. And yet, in their absence, Apple’s products picked up some of the most positive coverage all the same.

Take poor old Dell, which at CES announced a major rebranding for its PC lines. Instead of XPS, Inspiron, and Latitude, the company’s machines will be branded as Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max—terms that are familiar to customers because they’re inspired, shall we charitably say, by the iPhone. The result? Mockery for Dell and a bunch of headlines that plug Apple’s products and make the Cupertino company sound like a trendsetter.

I rather feel for Dell, which clearly got this one wrong and doesn’t seem to know how to make it right. Apple has a tendency to do very difficult and complicated things and make them look easy and simple. When rivals follow suit they trip over their shoelaces by adding, in this case, needlessly complicating sub-brands like Plus and Premium. In any case, simplicity isn’t about your choice of words, it’s about the fundamental structure of your product portfolio. (Incidentally, Apple doesn’t always get these things right either. 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 firm’s Project Digits supercomputer had barely landed on the CES show floor before it was getting described as a Mac mini clone, and not without good reason. It’s far more powerful (and correspondingly far more expensive) than the Mac mini, but the palmtop design is extremely familiar, as is the focus on AI. And it would be hard to imagine that the words “Like a Mac mini, except…” were not uttered at some point in its development cycle.

Nvidia

Even some of the more positive headlines were marred, for Apple’s rivals, by invidious comparisons with the absent giant. Asus got pretty much everything right with the Zenbook A14, but suffered the indignity of seeing this heralded as little more than a “MacBook Air competitor”. The company, in fact, played up to the comparison, joking that it had considered the name Zenbook Air. But I always regard this strategy, which in movies and TV shows is known as lampshading, as cheating. Joking that your design is unoriginal doesn’t change the fact that it is.

Whether or not they’re prepared to admit it, Apple’s rivals spent much of CES 2025 trying to copy its moves. Instead of using its absence from the show as an opportunity to present something different, they delivered more of the same–only with PC chips, worse software, and disastrous branding. Whereas Apple got a bunch of uncritical PR without doing anything.

It’s often said that Apple doesn’t innovate out of thin air. Rather, it bides its time and lets other companies build up a market before swooping in at the crucial moment and grabbing the revenue. I would agree that the company is rarely first to enter a market. But what it often does is create the first iconic product in a market, the one which defines what that market represents in the popular consciousness–and, all too often, in the minds of its competitors too. After the launch of an iPhone or a MacBook Air, rivals struggle to envision an alternative that doesn’t begin with Apple’s offering and then iterate from that.

The irony is that if the companies really wanted to be like Apple, the best thing would be not to turn up at CES at all. But when the star player is away, it’s simply too tempting to rush onto the field and do your best to impress the fans.