Apple's output of the iPhone SE will drop by a fifth in the coming quarter. The Nikkei Asia website reported that the company had been telling a number of suppliers that production orders for the next three months would be lower by about two or three million units.

Orders for AirPods earphones were down, by about 10 million units for the whole year, the website said, citing four unnamed individuals as sources.

While these figures are bad, rather than admit that Apple fanboys have lost interest in earpods or the iPhone SE, the Tame Apple Press claims it is all to do with Tsar Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

You might think, hang on a minute, why would a war in Ukraine stop people buying a particular flavour of iPhone? The rationale works like this:

1. The Iphone SE makes up 12 per cent of Apple total sales and Jobs’ Mob even released a new one on 8 March. It also has Apple’s over-hyped chip. According to the Tame Apple Press that means that any reduction of sales must be due to something external to Apple. It can’t possibly be that the product is not very good and no one is really interested in the over-hyped new M1 chip
2. There are two bad things going on in the world that the public knows about -- Covid and the War in Ukraine. Only the Italian government is frightened of Covid anymore so the sales reduction must be due to Putin.

So how do we pin this on Putin? Well apparently Apple accessory vendor Burga released figures on 7 March, showing that in Russia the company had about US$7.6 billion of sales in 2021. Based on that, iPhone revenue was calculated at about US$1.14 billion.

So because Apple has been forced to pull out of Russia, sales in that country will be reduced. However, that does not explain specifically why the iPhone SE and not other brands of phone are suffering. The SE was a cheap and cheerful model, but in Russia Apple customers are mostly the super-rich and children of Oligarchs rather than people who have to work for six months even to afford an Apple SE.

It is, therefore, more likely that Tsar Putin might be responsible for bombing schools, hospitals, residential areas of Ukraine, invading a country, sending in the neo-nazi terror organisation the Wagner group, into Ukraine, arranging Chechen death squads and assassinations, but he is probably innocent of the failure of the iPhone SE.