Edible Apple

During yesterday’s earnings conference call, Apple COO Tim Cook was asked how Apple is planning to deal with an increasingly competitive tablet marketplace.

Cook responded,

Well, and if you’re look at what’s shipping today, there’s not much out there as you know. And generally speaking, there’s two kinds of groups today, that are at least on the market today. The ones that are using a Windows-based operating system are generally fairly big and heavy and expensive. They have a very weak battery life, they require a keyboard or a stylus as an input device. And from our point of view and what we’ve seen, customers, frankly, just are not interested in them. Then you have the Android tablet, the variety that are out shipping today, the operating system wasn’t really designed for a tablet. And Google has said this, and so this is not just an Apple view by any means. And so you wind up having a size of a tablet that is less than what we believe is reasonable or even one that would provide what we feel is a real tablet experience. And so basically, you wind up with kind of a scaled-up smartphone, which is a bizarre product in our view. Then you’ve got kind of a third group — and so those are the two that are shipping today. And frankly speaking, it’s hard for me to understand if somebody does a side-by-side with an iPad, I think some enormous percentage of people are going to select iPad there. Those are not tablets that we have any concern on. The next-generation Android tablets, which are primarily what you mentioned in terms of the CES, there’s nothing shipping yet, and so I don’t know. Generally, they lack performance specs, they lack prices, they lack timing. And so today, they’re vapor. We’ll assess them as they come out. However, we’re not sitting still. And we have a huge first-mover advantage. And we have an incredible user experience from iTunes to the App Store, and an enormous number of apps and a huge ecosystem. And so we’re very, very confident with entering into a fight with anyone.