Tablets will outsell PCs, says Apple chief as he hints at TV product

Tablets such as the iPad will outsell desktop and laptop PCs within a few years and eat into their sales, says Apple chief executive Tim Cook.

He also hinted that the company could be preparing to launch into the smart TV market with a revamped version of the Apple TV set-top box, and that Apple still sees enormous potential for growth in the smartphone market, especially in China.

Speaking at a Goldman Sachs technology conference, the transcript of which has been put online by Macrumors, the head of the world's most valuable company – who took over from Steve Jobs last August when Jobs, then seriously ill, stepped aside – insisted that he would not let the "unique culture and unique company" unravel after its co-founder's death last October: "I'm not going to witness or permit the slow undoing of it. I believe in it so deeply."

He also dealt with the topic of supply conditions for workers in the company's supply chain, insisting that Apple cares about every worker and that the audit being conducted by the Fair Labor Association was probably the biggest in manufacturing in history.

He revealed too that Apple now has 100m users of its iCloud data synchronisation service, which was launched in October. "I view iCloud not as something with a year or two product life – it's a strategy for the next decade or more. It's truly profound," Cook said.

Cook suggested that the growth of tablets "will be good for the PC industry, because there will be this strong competitor and tablets will innovate like crazy and customers will decide which to buy. There will be a strong PC industry but tablets will be stronger in units."

He said he had begun using the original iPad before its launch in January 2010: "We had our [window] shades pulled so no one [else in the company] could see us, but it quickly became that 80-90% of my consumption and work was done on the iPad.

"From the first day it shipped, we thought that the tablet market would become larger than the PC market and it was just a matter of time."

Apple's iPad sales in the fourth quarter of 2011 hit 15.4m, more than double the number of the same period in 2010, while total worldwide PC sales fell by about 1% to 92.5m, based on figures from the research companies IDC and Gartner.