Tim Cook Spells Out the Rapid Growth of Apple’s iPad

Apple

Apple on Tuesday posted a blowout second quarter, nearly doubling its profit from the year-ago quarter. That’s notable because in years past, Apple’s second-quarter earnings had not been nearly as strong. The iPad, however, has helped change that.

Apple sold 11.8 million iPads during the quarter, more than double the number it sold last year. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, helped put this in perspective during the company’s earnings call.

“Just two years after we shipped the initial iPad, we sold 67 million,” he said. “It took us 24 years to sell that many Macs, and five years for that many iPods, and over three years for that many iPhones.”

That illustrates just how fast the tablet market is growing. Mr. Cook had previously said that he believed the tablet market would eventually be bigger than the PC market. Apple has had the luxury of having no serious competition in the tablet category. (It faces competition from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony in the subsegment of people who want to use the device primarily to read e-books.)

For comparison, PC shipments in the United States totaled 15.5 million units in the first three months of 2012, representing a 3.5 percent decline from the same period last year, according to Gartner, the research firm. Worldwide PC shipments for the quarter, however, totaled 89 million units, representing 1.9 percent overall growth, according to Gartner.