Apple's devices powered by its smartphone operating system  - the iPad particularly - are outselling the traditional Mac computer and affecting the latter's sales, says Tim Cook, the tech giant's CEO.

In his keynote, Apple CEO Tim Cook called the iPad "absolutely incredible" and praised the industry innovation it is driving. COURTESY VALERY MARCHIVE/FLICKR

"I think that iPad has cannibalized some Mac sales," said Cook at his most recent keynote address Tuesday. "The way that we always view cannibalization is, we prefer we do it than have somebody else do it. And so we never want to hold back one of our teams from building the absolute greatest thing, even if it takes some sales from another product area."

The statement comes on the heels of a first quarter that saw record sales of the tablet, along with the company's iPhone. And in spite of the siphoning of sales by their mobile devices, the Mac computers still posted gains.

The iPad saw a 111 per cent sales growth in Q1 2011 over the same quarter last year, moving almost 15.5 million units, according to a company release.

Apple has sold 55 million iPads since launch in April 2010.

"That 55 [million] is something no one would have guessed, including us," said Cook in his speech. "To put it in context, it took us 22 years to sell 55 million Macs. It took us about 5 years to sell 22 million iPods, and it took us about 3 years to sell that many iPhones... it's a trajectory that's off the charts."

Though the wild success of the tablet couldn't have been predicted, it can easily be explained.

"For an increasing number of people, I think smartphones and tablets have more than all of the capacity that they need," Dave Mason, a computer science professor at Ryerson University, told thedailyplanet.com. "When people ask me what computer they should be getting these days, I usually say an iPad, because if what they want to do is surf the web, do email, and maybe run some productivity applications, that's probably a better platform for them."

"It's amazing how the product has captured so many people," said Cook. "Everybody has one, reading their newspaper or whatever. In education, it's being used; in the enterprise, it's being used in big numbers. From my point of view, it's the fastest adoption across a wide range that I've ever seen before."

The issue with conventional computers, said Mason, is that "they're starting to wildly exceed the needs."

"You're seeing things like the new Mountain Lion [OS], which are doing all sorts of very fancy graphics and so on mostly just because they can, and to make it look sexier,"  he said. "But in terms of absolute computing power, my 3GS certainly has all the computing power necessary to do all the work that I need to do."

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