If purchases of the successful-if-flawed Amazon Flaming routine into iPad sales during the holiday season, Apple CEO Tim Ready didn’t see it.
“I looked at the data specially in the US on a weekly base afterwards Amazon launched the Kindle Fire, and in my regard there wasn’t an obvious effect on the [iPad sales] numbers,” Ready told analysts and reporters during a outcry afterwards Apple declared its impressive first-quarter financial results on Tuesday.
When one analyst involved him if he had discovered the supposition that some customers had looked at the $199 Fire, found it wanting, then moved up the cost ladder to the $499-to-$829 iPad, Ready said that, yes, he had learnt 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 regard is – looking 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 outcome 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 penny increase over the year-ago quarter, that upshot was scarcely fatal to Apple’s Mac Bone 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 therefore we love that trend. We consider it’s bully for us.”
That said, the iPad is making inroads into traditionally potent Mac markets. In K-12 education, for example, Prepare pronounced that Apple sold twice equally many iPads as Macs – though he didn’t render a time frame. “Generally speaking,” he said, “education adopts young technologies fairly slowly, therefore that’s reasonably 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 continue to grow, Prepare said. “I understandably believe, and many others in the companionship believe, that there will got a daytime when the tablet market, in units, is larger than the PC market,” citing IDC’s recent research that pictured tablet sales receive already exceeded desktop-PC sales in the US.
And when Ready 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 purchase those,” he said, “and I think they’ll sell a evenhandedly bit of units, simply I don’t conceive 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, Prepare was sanguine. “Y’know, finally yr was supposed to be the year of the tablet,” he said. “I think nigh people would harmonise that it was the yr of the iPad – for the minute yr in a row.”
But when he was asked if the tablet market was merely a “two-horse race” between the iPad and Android-based devices, Make did admit that not whole important players had withal joined that race.
“There’s a horse in Redmond that forever suits up, and ever runs, and will continue running,” he said. Just no issue how many horses there will finally be in that race, “We simply want to rest forward and exist the principal one