One of the big questions hanging over Apple this quarter was whether or not iPad sales would continue its rapid growth. Last quarter Amazon introduced the Kindle Fire at $200 (well below the iPAd's entry-level $500 price) and there was concern that even Apple diehard fans might delay their purchase of a tablet until the iPad 3 comes out—rumored for later this year. But iPad sales came in well above expectations at 15.4 million units. It is now a $9.1 billion business. There have been a total of 55 million iPads sold since launch in 2010.
iPad sales continue to surprise (http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/20/tim-cook-netbooks-ipad/) even CEO Tim Cook. During the conference call (http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/24/apples-q1-2012-46-3b-in-revenue-37m-iphones-and-15-4m-ipads-sold/) today, Cook predicted: "I think there will come a day that the tablet market is larger than the PC market."
His repeated an earlier statement that the iPad is cannibalizing Mac sales (http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/19/ipad-cannibalizing-pc/), but it is cannibalizing Windows PC sales much more.
Cook also addressed the competition without mentioning the Kindle Fire's name: "I think people really want to do multiple things with their tablets; as a result, we don't really see these limited function tablets, these e-readers, as being in the same category. I don't think people who want an iPad will settle for a limited function."
The iPad's strength, he argues, is that it is a general-purpose device, not a limited to just a few media-consuming functions (http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/28/kindle-fire-cloud-media-tablet/). There are "over 170,000″ iPad apps, orders of magnitude more than another tablet. "It's not just a product,"s ays Cook, "it is a strategy for the next decade."
TechCrunch