Stefan Mileschin

The writing is on the wall for the flash in the pan cargo cult Apple.

The outfit announced that it sold only 33.8 million iPhones in its September quarter, which would be good for any other company that did not pride itself on meteoric growth.

Stock slid by five percent as shareholders realised that things were not going to get better for Apple for a while.

The cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street had thought that Apple would surprise them and say that all the rumours about cutting back on production were untrue.

While chief executive Tim Cook predicted a "really great" holiday season the figures for the last quarter were underwhelming.

Revenues from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan climbed just six percent to $5.7 billion in the quarter, despite the 5C and 5S going on sale in September. This figure was supposed to be much higher and indicate that Apple had cracked the Chinese market.

Overall sales grew by about 24 percent from the previous quarter, or by about $1.1 billion. That was behind the $1.4 billion that Apple managed to tack on in the December quarter of 2012.

Cook, the freshly hatched CEO of Apple, thought results from China were "pretty good" but acknowledged there was room for improvement.

What Cook did not talk about was the balls up the company made launching an overpriced iPhone 5C while restricting supply for the more expensive 5S because of the Bosch effect, as we revealed here.

http://news.techeye.net/business/app...t-so-yesterday