Apple insists that the only reason that Apple fanboys did not splash out $6 billion in sales during the company's fiscal fourth quarter was because it could not get enough of the shiny toys into the shops.
To make matters worse for Wall Street, Chief Executive Tim Cook said that the impact will be even worse during the current holiday sales quarter.
Had any other company said this, we would be inclined to believe them, but Apple has some of the aggressive supply contracts in the business and had managed to keep its goods on the shelves when others could not manage it.
Cook said that the quarter ended Sept. 25 had "larger than expected supply constraints" as well as pandemic-related manufacturing disruptions in Southeast Asia. While Apple had seen "significant improvement" by late October in those Southeast Asian facilities, the chip shortage has persisted and is now affecting "most of our products", Cook said.
"We're doing everything we can do to get more chips and also everything we can do operationally to make sure we're moving just as fast as possible", Cook said.
Cook said the company expects year-over-growth for its quarter ending in December. Analysts expect growth of 7.4 percent to $119.7 billion.
"We're projecting very solid demand growth year over year. But we are also predicting that we're going to be short of demand by larger than $6 billion", Cook said.
Shares in Apple fell 3.4 percent on Thursday making Microsoft the world's most valuable company after a run-up in Microsoft shares on the strength of its cloud computing business.
Apple said revenues and profits for the fiscal fourth quarter were $83.4 billion and $1.24 per share, compared with analyst estimates of $84.8 billion and $1.24 per share, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.
Apple told investors in July that chip constraints would start to hit its iPhone and iPad lineups for the first time in the fourth quarter.
The Tame Apple Press is doing its best to put a positive spin on the news. Pointing out that Amazon.com also predicted holiday-quarter sales well below Wall Street expectations. However analysts are starting to wonder about TAPs optimism about its favourite company given that it had such a huge supply chain advantage with most of its suppliers putting the company before anyone else.
Blaming supply chain issues for Apple’s woes might also be a method of covering up something else. Apple said fourth-quarter iPhone sales were $38.9 billion, short of estimates of $41.5 billion which were epected.
But Cook cryptically blamed chips made with older technology as the reason for this issue. For that to be the case it must mean that punters are not buying Apple’s newer phones.
The company's accessories segment, which contains fast-growing categories like its AirPods wireless headphones, came in at $8.8 billion, half a billion dollars lower than analyst expectations of $9.3 billion.
Other segments fared better. Sales for iPads and Macs were $8.3 billion and $9.2 billion, compared with analyst estimates of $7.2 billion and $9.2 billion.
The company's services segment - which contains its App Store business - had sales of $18.3 billion in revenue, up 26 per cent, compared with analyst expectations of $17.6 billion. Cook told Reuters that Apple now has 745 million paid subscribers to its platform, up from the 700 million it disclosed a quarter ago.
