Of the thousands of products vying for our attention here on the floor of CES, Apple is not showing anything off.
That's on purpose.
The Cupertino tech giant mostly stays away from the show, preferring to launch products on its own time, at its own events.
But Apple is being felt in Las Vegas Wednesday - not because of the iPhones in the Convention Center; there's buzz about all that money (and all those jobs) created by the App Store.
Apple, with timing that has to make you smile, released its latest app figures Wednesday morning, and the buzz rippled through CES. New Year's Day, it says, was the biggest one-day app sales day yet , with $144 million in sales. For apps.
In 2015, Apple says people spent $20 billion inside the App Store. A big number, yes, maybe most impressive when you realize app developers pulled in 70 percent of that. Since the App Store opened, Apple says it has paid out close to $40 billion to those developers, creating thousands of jobs along the way.
App jobs are tough to quantify, but on a large scale, Twitter, Zynga, and many other mobile tools we take for granted got their big boost from the App Store.
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Good enough news for Apple to briefly shake things up here at CES. Not so on Wall Street, though, where investors are looking past apps to those cell phones, and wondering if sales have slowed. Apple shares tumbled bit in early trading.
Scott is roaming the floor at CES. You can get his updates on Twitter: @scottbudman
