This is Tim: Cook on Apple's fourth-quarter earnings, the iPad mini, and more

26.10.2012

In terms of what we saw in China for Q4, revenue was $7.5 billion, that's up 26% year on year, Mac was up extremely strong, up 44 percent. As you recall, we launched portables for the first time in July; the portables that we'd previously announced in the U.S. in June, we announced in China in July. iPad was up 45 percent in greater China, iPhone was up 38 and so all in all, a fantastic quarter.

That brings us to a full fiscal year revenue number of $23.8 billion for China, which is really phenomenal when you think about it--that's up over 10 billion year on year, up 78 percent and greater China now represents about 15 percent of Apple for the fiscal year. And so we're extremely happy with how we've done in China; as Peter alluded to in his opening remarks, we are continuing to invest in our own retail stores there. We continue to expand distribution with channel partners as well, and we continue to see it as an extremely exciting market with more and more people wanting Apple products.

I haven't personally played with a Surface yet, but the...What we're reading about it is that it's a fairly compromised, confusing product. I think one of the toughest things you do deciding [about a] product is to make hard tradeoffs, and decide what a product should be. We've really done that with the iPad, and the user experience is absolutely incredible. I suppose you could design a car that flies and floats, but I don't think it would do all of those things very well, and so I think people, when they look at the iPad versus competitive offerings, are going to conclude they really want an iPad. I think people have done that to date and I think that they'll continue to do that.