If purchases of the successful-if-flawed Amazon Flaming turn into iPad sales during the holiday season, Apple CEO Tim Ready 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 see there wasn’t an obvious upshot on the [iPad sales] numbers,” Fix said analysts and reporters during a call later Apple announced its impressive first-quarter financial results on Tuesday.
When one analyst asked him if he had learnt the guess that some customers received looked at the $199 Fire, felt it wanting, then impressed up the cost ladder to the $499-to-$829 iPad, Prepare pronounced that, yes, he received discovered that theory, but he discounted it.
“Whether that’s happening on a very, identical large basis, I don’t know,” he said. “Again, my own reckon is – looking at our data in the US – there was no obvious change.”
But if the iPad didn’t tempt prospective purchasers die from lower-priced fondleslabs, it did receive 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 centime increase over the year-ago quarter, that consequence 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 thus we love that trend. We believe it’s smashing for us.”
That said, the iPad is making inroads into traditionally potent Mac markets. In K-12 education, for example, Cook enunciated that Apple sold double as many iPads as Macs – though he didn’t furnish a time frame. “Generally speaking,” he said, “education adopts new technologies fair slowly, thence that’s somewhat 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 keep to grow, Ready said. “I intelligibly believe, and many others in the fellowship believe, that there will come a daytime when the tablet market, in units, is larger than the PC market,” citing IDC’s recent inquiry that rendered tablet sales receive already exceeded desktop-PC sales in the US.
And when Ready says tablet, he agency iPad, and not “limited-function tablets and e-readers” that he relegated into a different category altogether. “There’s understandably customers that will purchase those,” he said, “and I consider they’ll sell a fair bit of units, but I don’t consider that people who desire 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, last twelvemonth was supposed to exist the yr of the tablet,” he said. “I think virtually people would harmonize that it was the year of the iPad – for the moment yr in a row.”
But when he was needed if the tablet market was merely a “two-horse race” between the iPad and Android-based devices, Fix did admit that not whole important players received however joined that race.
“There’s a horse in Redmond that always suits up, and perpetually runs, and will continue running,” he said. Simply no subject how many horses there will finally be in that race, “We simply want to stay forward and exist the lead one
