Cook: The iPad Stands on the Shoulders of Everything That Came Before It

Apple shipped some 55 million iPads since first bringing the device to market. It took 22 years to sell that many Macs and three years to sell that many iPhones. What’s driving that hockey-stick ramp up, among the fastest of any product in history?

That question was put to Apple CEO Tim Cook at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference Tuesday, and he had an interesting answer for it. The iPad’s trajectory is driven by the products that came before it.

“The pace of innovation around iPad is absolutely incredible,” Cook said. “We’ve gone from iPad 1 to iPad 2 in very short order, and the eocsystem around it is clearly thriving. The reason the iPad’s ramp has been so large in my view is that the iPad has stood on the shoulders of everything that came before it — the iTunes store, the iPhone. People trained on these products so by the time the iPad launched it was intuitive to use. I gave one to my mother and she knew how to use it, like this, just from watching the commercial.”