Apple CEO John Ternus says the company can't predict when iPhone Duo supply will catch up with demand — a frank admission that the supply-chain crunch Washington keeps insisting is over is still very much alive on the shelves where ordinary Americans actually shop.
"Duo is constrained as of today," Ternus told Reuters following Apple's earnings report. "The ramp is going well, and we're working hard to get it to as many customers as quickly as possible, but at this point, we're not able to predict when supply and demand will be in balance."
Orders placed today won't arrive until January. Stores have almost no stock for online reservations. That's a three-month wait for a product that went on sale in October — and the CEO of the most valuable company on earth can't tell you when it ends.
Meanwhile, Apple posted a September quarter revenue record of $114.5 billion, up 12 percent year over year. Wall Street beat its expectations. 9to5Mac framed the story around Wall Street's "curiosity" about revenue forecasts for the current quarter. MacRumors kept the focus on the consumer reality: no stock, no timeline. The disconnect tells you everything about who the economy is measured for and who it's actually working for.
The iPhone Duo display issues add insult to injury. Ternus acknowledged that "a very small percentage" of units have been returned with screen problems and said Apple is offering replacements. Both outlets reported this; neither pressed on what's causing the defects or whether the supply crunch is pushing defective units out the door faster than quality control can catch them.
The bigger picture: the administration has spent months telling Americans the supply chain is healing. The Dow's up. Earnings are up. But when the CEO of a $3 trillion company says he has no timeline for getting a flagship product to the people who want to buy it, that's the real economy talking. Record corporate revenues don't fill backorders. They don't lower the price of groceries. And they don't mean much to the American who's being told everything is fine while he waits until January for something he ordered in October.
The question isn't whether Apple can eventually catch up. It's whether the people running the economy — in Washington and on Wall Street — will ever have to answer for the gap between their headlines and what's actually on the shelf.
