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The New York Times confirmed today that Apple is drastically cutting iPhone 5 orders, just as the Wall Street Journal and Nikkei of Japan reported yesterday. It’s too early to say that the tide is turning, but things don’t seem too rosy in Cupertino:
Apple does appear to be cutting back on orders for its latest iPhone from its manufacturing partners, as Nikkei of Japan and The Wall Street Journal reported earlier. Paul Semenza, an analyst at NPD DisplaySearch, a research firm that follows the display market, said that for January, Apple had expected to order 19 million displays for the iPhone 5 but cut the order to 11 million to 14 million. Mr. Semenza said these numbers came from sources in the supply chain, the companies that make components for Apple products.
Yet, Apple hasn’t offered any explanation—even while their stock continues to dive! dive! dive! faster than James Cameron’s submarine.
The usual Apple flacks argued that Apple is not replying to the reports because “they can’t.” They pulled some false excuse about the SEC prohibiting it, but the fact is that the Infinite Loop company can answer to the reports if they wanted to, as Virtual Pants explains clearly in this post:
A couple nights ago, the Wall Street Journal published a report claiming that Apple has significantly decreased component orders due to weaker-than-expected demand for the iPhone 5. Apple bloggers John Gruber and Jim Dalrymple quickly came to Apple’s defense and claimed that the WSJ report was merely stock manipulation. Gruber had six posts on the story yesterday alone, including a link to Jim’s post titled “Apple can’t respond to rumors of iPhone 5 cuts even if it wanted to,” which states:
“I’ve been asked a lot today why Apple hasn’t responded to the Wall Street Journal article saying that there have been massive cuts to iPhone 5 orders. The simple fact is, they can’t.
SEC rules prohibit Apple from talking publicly about the company. This is known as a quiet period and all publicly traded companies must adhere to these rules.”
It doesn’t seem as though this is correct. First, the quiet period is associated with registration statements (“a quiet period extends from the time a company files a registration statement with the SEC until SEC staff declare the registration statement “effective.”), which are filed before a public offering, not before earnings reports. Second, Jim’s article doesn’t explain why Apple, and other companies, routinely announce product sales figures. Of course, these announcements are usually only made when it’s good news. But good news can affect the price of a stock just as much as bad news. Third, this article from CNET directly contradicts Jim’s post:
“There is no law to break. The SEC does not require any quiet period before a quarterly report.
For years, publicly traded companies have been citing rules from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as reasons not to discuss almost anything related to corporate operations in the weeks preceding a quarterly report. “SEC-mandated quiet period” often becomes a boilerplate phrase for public-relations personnel when earnings are less than a month away.
Yet it’s not even an SEC rule.”
Granted, the CNET article is from 2001, but I’ve yet to find anything contrary. It looks like Jim and John have erroneously passed along a misstated corporate excuse as established fact.
Virtual Pants’ text reproduced with permission.
WSJ: Apple Cuts Orders of iPhone Parts Following Low Demand
A Simple Explanation of Why Software Patents Suck
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You can run this story a million times and there’ll always be two possible outcomes; There has been lower than expected iPhone 5 sales, OR they’re readying the next iteration of iPhone for release in April/May and they have enough stock of the current model. Of course both could also be true.
Or the Iphone5 is a flop.
Thats… yeah, no. Its simply not the case.
Poor sales, do tour research bus!
Lower than expected iPhone 5 sales is not the same as poor sales.
Yeah it is. It’s poor sales relative to what the market expected for Apple’s iPhone 5.
My Mother phoned me up saying hers comes tomoz :\ I told her to get it on Three but she went with Vodafone where she has no signal…… I don’t understand why, it is easy to carry your number over. It’s funny because she has a Three iPad that I got her and she said it’s the only contract that stays the same price and she has signal everywhere, even if it is weaker than my GS2……. I swear Apple devices always have poorer signal.
Just does my head in, I wish I could disown her. Next week I’ll get calls that the paint is scratching off because she throws it in her handbag and that it still has no signal and none of her previous chargers or speaker docks work and her car is for the older connector too.
You can’t tell one’s old dear anything lol. Mine’s the same.
I said to her for your use a SSD is the best upgrade you can make, way better than buying a new laptop with a slow SSD. She ended up buying a new Laptop and she comes complaining it is slow again. There is a reason people think Mac Laptops are fast and that is because they all have SSDs inside, nothing to do with the software or the sub par hardware you pay the odds for.
So I bought her a SSD and installed and she opens her screen now and the Laptop is instantly into Windows, it instantly turns off, it instantly loads up any files like video or music and every web page is instant unless the servers are slow.
Unless you’re a gamer or edit a lot of media content an SSD is all you need.
It annoys me too because my friend owns a shop where he repairs hardware and I sometimes help him on a Saturday because he’s struggling atm. Like customers come in, you tell them what they need and they end up buying some new machine somewhere else and bringing that in for repair months later complaining it is slow or whatever. I’m thinking in my head that I’ve seen them before and…. I dunno I hate people.
I always look into what I’m buying and spend months studying so I know what I need to know when purchasing or building like a PC of my own. I don’t understand how people can be so ignorant to everything they’re doing.
You see this in everything though, like every job I’ve always put 100% into what I do, even when I was just building Avolite stage lighting dimmers. It’s boring and repetitive but you should have pride in your work. I found ways to improve and shorten the build times and I had fun working all that stuff out.
If I was making Big Macs in McDonalds I’d do the same thing, I’d want to make the best Big Macs people have ever had and do it in an efficient and a production line method so fast food is actually fast. Now if I go to Mc Donalds which is like once every few years, I get a slop of mess….
I don’t understand how people can be so ignorant and not care.
i am like you, i research any product i want to buy even if its a kettle
You would have to be silly not to!
Agreed. I research EVERYTHING.
If you spend months looking into everything – how have you come to the conclusion that all Macs have SSDs???
I think his point was about public perception that Macs are the fastest, probably based on subjective performance reviews of their top end models (which do all have SSDs).
For example, they’d pit the new Mac xyz over the 2011 xyz and other windows laptops, and say how vastly faster the system performed, when the noticeable gains will simply be from the SSD rather than Apple magically having better (identical) mobile processors than their competitors.
Since when do all Mac’s have SSD’s?
OMFG!!!!
Ooh come on, this morning the everywhere the reason was because of low demand of iPhone 5. Obviously that crap poor build and not competition for the actual market was going to sink taking apple with it (also shitpad mini)
Or they are just hedging against the debt ceiling crisis?