Apple's Cook on iPad, Asia, Apple TV, and more

20.07.2011

I don't want to give you specific yield numbers, but the supply of iPad improved dramatically in the quarter. That allowed us to do the over 9.2 million, that's up from the 4.7 from the prior quarter, so we added almost 100 percent. We further improved the supply in the initial weeks of July, so that's allowed us to get into supply/demand balance on some SKUs in some countries. And so I feel very, very good about our progress in that area.

This is a good sort of problem, per se. The demand is fantastic, so there's not something that I would point to on the supply side and say that this has created a huge issue. It's a good problem. And as I said before, and I don't generally do that, but in this case I am, to talk about July and the first weeks of July... we're a little over 3 weeks into quarter. Supply has further improved since we ended our June quarter. And that further improvement has led some SKUs in some countries to become in supply/demand balance. Now I'm not going to project what will happen to the other countries, but obviously we're working very, hard to get as many units to customers as we can.

We have a dual prong strategy with enterprise for iPad and iPhone. We work with carriers sales forces, and they have very large ones because they sell their services into enterprise, and many of these enterprises want one of our devices connected to it. And so we train and provide quite a bit of help to the carrier forces. Plus we do some sales directly ourselves, or act as an overlay sales force to a channel that sells to enterprise. I would characterize this as, we're still building it out, and we do a bit better each quarter. We're very, very happy... about the level of interest and taking people to the pilot and initial deployment stages. And now our attention is moving to penetration within those accounts, versus sort of getting on the standards list.

I think if you really looked at it fairly, to be this far into the enterprise with a product that's only been shipping for 15 months in the case of iPad, is absolutely incredible, because the enterprise is typically much more conservative and takes a long time to evaluate products. And in this case, people are moving at a speed I haven't seen. Also, in a group that's not thought of as enterprise, K-12, also takes a very long time for a new product category. But last quarter we sold more iPads in K-12 than we did Macs. And to do that after just five quarters is absolutely shocking. We would have never predicted this. And so we feel very, very good about the different areas that iPad is being sold into. It's clear that it has a universal appeal in many different markets, from consumer to business to government, and on and on.

I don't want to make a comment about iPad, except that we think iPad will grow significantly year over year. We'll leave the rest of it to you to conclude. And then we'll be very happy to report in October how we did.