If purchases of the successful-if-flawed Amazon Flame turn into iPad sales during the holiday season, Apple CEO Tim Make didn’t see it.
“I looked at the data peculiarly in the US on a weekly basis later Amazon launched the Kindle Fire, and in my reckon there wasn’t an obvious outcome on the [iPad sales] numbers,” Make told analysts and reporters during a outcry later Apple announced its impressive first-quarter financial results on Tuesday.
When one analyst necessitated him if he had heard the speculation that some customers received looked at the $199 Fire, found it wanting, then affected up the price ladder to the $499-to-$829 iPad, Cook articulated that, yes, he received heard that theory, simply he discounted it.
“Whether that’s happening on a very, identical large basis, I don’t know,” he said. “Again, my ain reckon is – look at our data in the US – there was no obvious change.”
But if the iPad didn’t tempt prospective purchasers conk from lower-priced fondleslabs, it did experience an upshot on the sales of another of Apple’s offerings: the Mac.
“There is cannibalization, clearly, of the Mac by the iPad,” he admitted – although with 5.2 million Macs sold during the quarter, a 26 per cent increase over the year-ago quarter, that effect was scarcely fatal to Apple’s Mac Os X boxes.
Cook added that Apple believes that if anyone is suffering from the iPad’s success, it’s PC manufacturers. “And there’s many more of them to cannibalize,” he said, “and so we love that trend. We conceive it’s keen for us.”
That said, the iPad is making inroads into traditionally stiff Mac markets. In K-12 education, for example, Make said that Apple sold twice equally many iPads equally Macs – though he didn’t provide a time frame. “Generally speaking,” he said, “education adopts young technologies fair slowly, hence that’s middling surprising.”
Cook characterized equally “remarkable” the sale of over 55 million iPads since the “magical and revolutionary” Cupertinian fondleslab shipped in early April 2010.
iPad sales will proceed to grow, Make said. “I intelligibly believe, and many others in the fellowship believe, that there will arrived a daytime when the tablet market, in units, is larger than the PC market,” citing IDC’s recent enquiry that depicted tablet sales receive already exceeded desktop-PC sales in the US.
And when Prepare says tablet, he means iPad, and not “limited-function tablets and e-readers” that he relegated into a different category altogether. “There’s intelligibly customers that will buy those,” he said, “and I think they’ll sell a fairly act of units, simply I don’t consider that people who want an iPad will settle for a limited-function [device].”
As for competition from full-function tablets such as, say, the Motolola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab, the less-than-concisely named Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, and their ilk, Make was sanguine. “Y’know, lastly yr was supposed to be the twelvemonth of the tablet,” he said. “I conceive virtually people would agree that it was the year of the iPad – for the second yr in a row.”
But when he was necessitated if the tablet market was only a “two-horse race” between the iPad and Android-based devices, Cook did admit that not completely important players had yet joined that race.
“There’s a horse in Redmond that perpetually suits up, and incessantly runs, and will keep running,” he said. Only no matter how many horses there will finally be in that race, “We merely desire to remain before and be the principal one
