I look at images of Apple products and can't tell if they're CG or meticulous studio photography.

see also ikea. they had their modellers take photography courses and their photographers take 3d modelling classes IIRC. good luck telling renders from photos in their catalogue.

I can confirm this. Source: IKEA communications, their marketing arm, was a client of a company I used to work for. Not only were we given a lot of source material, but we also got to tour IKEA HQ in Älmhult, Sweden, whenever we went down there for meetings and the likes. It's really quite remarkable what they've got down there. Several photo and movie studios, with essentially a warehouse full of IKEA furniture from pretty much every era, in at least three copies I think they said. The 3d department in contrast was unassuming – just a few people (can't remember exact count, but I'd guess less than 20 at least) in a room doing amazing work. We'd spend a bunch of time looking at pictures playing "can you pick out what's rendered and what's not?" kind of thing. (Side note: this was around the time IKEA decided to switch to Verdana from their proprietary IKEA Sans font as well, and it was fun to get an inside perspective on it.)

I very much enjoyed working with them – highly professional people that really know what they're doing.