Cook hit the headlines this week claiming that people were going to reject PCs in favour of tablets. His words echoed those of his predecessor, Steve Jobs, who in 2010 proclaimed that the “post-PC era” had arrived.

Dell, who has been making computers since the early 1980s, the era of the PC is far from over.

“The post-PC era has been great for the PC. When the post-PC era started there were about 180m PCs being sold a year and now it’s up to over 300m, so I like the post-PC era,” he said.

“For the last 11 quarters in a row, we’ve been gaining share in PCs. Last year we outgrew HP and Lenovo. It’s a business with an installed base of 1.8bn PCs, 600m of them are more than four years old, and as we create new beautiful, thin, powerful PCs that are better than the thing you bought five years ago, people will replace the old ones. And we are getting more and more share of that opportunity each quarter that goes by.”

He admitted that the market was changing rapidly and PCs have to compete for attention with a multitude of other devices which rely on the cloud.