If purchases of the successful-if-flawed Amazon Flame number into iPad sales during the holiday season, Apple CEO Tim Cook didn’t see it.

“I looked at the data specially in the US on a weekly base afterwards Amazon launched the Kindle Fire, and in my see there wasn’t an obvious consequence on the [iPad sales] numbers,” Ready said analysts and reporters during a yell subsequently Apple declared its impressive first-quarter financial results on Tuesday.

When one analyst needed him if he had heard the conjecture that some customers had looked at the $199 Fire, found it wanting, then impressed up the cost ladder to the $499-to-$829 iPad, Cook enunciated that, yes, he received seen that theory, merely he discounted it.

“Whether that’s happening on a very, identical big basis, I don’t know,” he said. “Again, my ain view is – look at our data in the US – there was no obvious change.”

But if the iPad didn’t tempt prospective purchasers die from lower-priced fondleslabs, it did get an effect on the sales of another of Apple’s offerings: the Mac.

“There is cannibalization, clearly, of the Mac by the iPad,” he admitted – although with 5.2 million Macs sold during the quarter, a 26 per centime increase over the year-ago quarter, that result was scarcely fatal to Apple’s Mac Bone X boxes.

Cook added that Apple believes that if anyone is suffering from the iPad’s success, it’s PC manufacturers. “And there’s many more of them to cannibalize,” he said, “and thence we love that trend. We consider it’s bully for us.”

That said, the iPad is making inroads into traditionally potent Mac markets. In K-12 education, for example, Make said that Apple sold doubly as many iPads equally Macs – though he didn’t render a time frame. “Generally speaking,” he said, “education adopts young technologies fair slowly, therefore that’s reasonably surprising.”

Cook characterized equally “remarkable” the sale of over 55 million iPads since the “magical and revolutionary” Cupertinian fondleslab shipped in early April 2010.

iPad sales will keep to grow, Ready said. “I understandably believe, and many others in the company believe, that there will arrived a daytime when the tablet market, in units, is larger than the PC market,” citing IDC’s recent enquiry that rendered tablet sales experience already exceeded desktop-PC sales in the US.

And when Ready says tablet, he agency iPad, and not “limited-function tablets and e-readers” that he relegated into a different category altogether. “There’s clearly customers that will buy those,” he said, “and I consider they’ll sell a fairly number of units, simply I don’t think that people who desire an iPad will settle for a limited-function [device].”

As for competition from full-function tablets such as, say, the Motolola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab, the less-than-concisely named Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, and their ilk, Prepare was sanguine. “Y’know, last yr was supposed to exist the twelvemonth of the tablet,” he said. “I consider nearly people would accord that it was the yr of the iPad – for the second twelvemonth in a row.”

But when he was needed if the tablet market was just a “two-horse race” between the iPad and Android-based devices, Fix did admit that not totally important players had however joined that race.

“There’s a horse in Redmond that incessantly suits up, and perpetually runs, and will continue running,” he said. Simply no topic how many horses there will eventually exist in that race, “We just desire to stay before and exist the lead one