Edible Apple

After meeting with Apple executives Tim Cook, Ron Johnson, and Peter Oppenheimer, Goldman Sachs analyst Bill Shope relayed that the higher ups at Apple are exceedingly optimistic about the future success of its iOS platform.

Shope says, “the company appeared more overtly optimistic on the long-term prospects for the iOS platform than it has been in quite some time.”

The execs wouldn’t divulge much about new iOS features, but they did talk about a few other things.

Cook said, “he sees no reason why the tablet market shouldn’t eclipse the PC market over the next several years,” according to Shope’s note.

To date, no competitor has been able to field a worthy adversary to the iPad as manufacturers are quickly finding out that competing against the iPhone was a far easier task.

Shope anticipates that Apple will sell 8.1 million iPads during the current quarter, a 72% increase from the same quarter a year-ago.

Now as for the always interesting battle between Android and iOS, Apple’s executives seemed wholly unconcerned by the marketshare gains enjoyed by Android explaining that while they may experience a short term boost in marketshare, fragmentation will inevitably kick in and have adverse affects on the platform.

Management continued to stress the advantages of Apple’s “integrated” iOS platform versus Google’s increasingly fragmented Android platform. Indeed, management noted that an open and free OS like Android was bound to enjoy a rapid expansion in its overall installed base near-term, but over time, the perils of platform fragmentation would weaken the value of this installed base and the overall platform ecosystem. Indeed, Apple reiterated that it had already paid out over $2 billion to iOS developers through app sales since 2008. Apple argues that this is how you should measure the value of a platform, not raw installed base growth. We tend to agree, and we continue to believe that Apple’s integrated platform approach will enable it to capture the lion’s share of the mobile device profit pool in coming year.

via Business Insider