Apple CEO Tim Cook
Sales of the iPad will grow from 120m last year to 375m per annum within four years, by which stage more iPads will be sold than PCs. In other words, this is the post-PC era and Apple is its poster child, Apple CEO Tim Cook told the Goldman Sachs technology conference today.
With more than 40bn apps downloaded from its App Store, some 500m active user accounts, more than 300,000 apps custom made for the iPad and more than US$8bn paid to developers, Apple has transformed forever the way software is made and sold.
In less than seven years since the iPhone debuted, Apple has upended the established order and now the others are playing catch-up, he told the conference.
According to a transcript of a question-and-answer session following his presentation, compiled by MacRumors.com, Cook believes Apple is the poster child of the post-PC revolution.
“We have over 300,000 apps custom designed for the tablet. The other guys have a few hundred. And you can see the whole of Apple coming out here. I don’t know about market share because we’re the only ones who really report numbers, but if you look at usage, IBM saw over Black Friday that shopping activity on iPad was twice as high as the entire Android market. Data is very clear that iPad is popular and people use it more.
“I’m not sure what people are doing with these other tablets. We want people to use our products, not just buy them. Our relationship starts there … it doesn’t end there.
“iPad is also moving into all of the key markets, in almost every Fortune 500/Global 500 company. Making inroads in education, and, of course, to consumers. It usually takes a long time to penetrate all of these markets, but we’ve already done that. But we still think we’re in the early innings of this,” Cook said.
Apple is a company without limits, Cook said
Cook said Apple is a company that has no limits and he doesn’t appear troubled by Wall Street anxiety over profit margins and product road maps.
In particular, he believes the iPhone platform, in particular, is going from strength to strength.
“When I look at smartphone market, I see a market that was at 700m last year … projected to double over next four years. Over the long-term all phones will be smartphones and there are a lot more people in the world than 1.4bn. And people like to upgrade regularly. This is an enormous market to get to.
“We’ve sold 500m as of the end of last year, but over 40pc of that happened last year. So there’s incredible momentum.
“And we’ve built a great ecosystem that is also fuelling a developer industry … we’ve now paid out over US$8bn to them. Innovation has all moved to tablets and smartphones, so there’s so much momentum. When you look at what we’re doing in China, it’s impressive.
“There are also areas where we’re not doing as well, and we view those as opportunities. When I string all of these things together, I see a wide open field,” Cook said.
