A very passionate Apple
With the tailwind of a $20 billion quarter and the knowledge that Apple could have sold even more iPhones and iPads, had they been available, Steve Jobs shot numerous broadsides at Microsoft as well as Google and their efforts to compete with Apple in the smartphone and tablet markets.
Microsoft would have a hard time to create a third software platform for smartphones next to Google and Apple, as "Android and iPhone are winning the battle," Steve Jobs said. "It will be very challenging for them." In response to Google's statement that 200,000 Android devices are selling every day, Jobs noted that 275,000 iPhones shipped per day over the past 30 days on average, with peak days of more than 300,000 units. Jobs considers Google as Apple's biggest competitor, not Nokia anymore, but said that it is not clear who is outshipping whom at this time.
He criticized Google for pitching an open platform model of Android versus the Apple closed platform model. According to Jobs, this is nothing else but a Google "smokescreen," and the real issue is a comparison between a fragmented versus an integrated model. He predicts that as more Android devices emerge, more Android versions come to market, more phone manufacturers create more proprietary interfaces, and more app markets go online, developers and users will see a big "mess." In some cases, software developers will have to put out more than 100 different versions of their software to support more than 200 different phones.
No 7" iPad
Jobs' pitch was even more aggressive on the iPad. So far, Apple has shipped more than 7.5 million iPads, and iPads outshipped Macs in the most recent quarter. The executive indicated that there will be no 7" iPads, as the company does not believe the screen size makes sense and is enough to "make a great tablet" as such a screen represents only 45% of the screen size of a 10″ tablet.
According to Jobs, the upcoming "handful of credible tablets" will be "dead on arrival" as they will not be able to match the iPad's price. Also, in Apple's opinion, a 7" device will be too large to compete with smartphones and too small to provide enough screen space for a tablet. Jobs described 7" tablets as "tweeners" that cannot succeed. He also referred to Android as a problem for those tablets as Google told manufacturers not to use the latest version of Android, but device manufacturers do it anyway. This "sounds like a lot of fun ahead," Jobs said.
Responding to the questions from analysts about the success rate of the iPad, Jobs said that iPads will affect the sales of notebooks, and that this is not a question of if, but when. "We have a tiger by the tail here," Jobs said. "It will be really big."
"iPad is a product that is hard to match. It is a product we have been training for for the last decade. We priced it very aggressively. We are out to win this one," Jobs said.
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