Apple has an official presence at CES 2020, the first time it has been on the bill since 1992. Senior director of privacy Jane Horvath is set to appear on a Chief Privacy Officer Roundtable on 7 January (via Bloomberg).
The panel is listed on CES’ official website where it shows Horvath will appear alongside executives from Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission.
The last time Apple was listed as a participant at CES was when CEO John Sculley introduced the Newton at CES in Chicago. Since then and all throughout Steve Jobs’s second tenure as CEO (1997-2011) Apple has not appeared at CES. Instead it used the Macworld Expo (now defunct) and latterly its own standalone events to whip up excitement for its consumer products.
The company helped fuel this trend in the wider consumer tech industry, resulting in CES today largely being devoid of major consumer tech brands or big releases. At CES 2019, only the Honor View 20 stood out as a notable smartphone release – a solid, but hardly world-beating, device.
Apple employees attend CES to meet with existing and potential partners, and no doubt business is done at a show that brings in tens of thousands of technology professionals. But it hasn’t put itself up for appearance for over 25 years, making this panel a notable one.
Our colleagues on Macworld discuss the significance of this step in a separate article: What’s Apple doing at CES 2020?
Author: Henry Burrell, Phones Editor
Henry is Tech Advisor’s Phones Editor, ensuring he and the team covers and reviews every smartphone worth knowing about for readers and viewers all over the world. He spends a lot of time moving between different handsets and shouting at WhatsApp to support multiple devices at once.