Again, Apple created the same amount of market buzz that normally accompanies its quarterly results but this time around, apprehensions ruled investors' sentiments instead of the usual excitement that had marked the tech titan's previous financial reports.

As far as Apple was concerned, there was no problem at all as it earned billions both in profits and revenues, with shareholders holding on to concrete notions that their money put on the American company were secured and growing, if not in dizzying pace as in the past periods, the pot were at least earning.

The problem was Apple fell short of market expectations and doing that twice in under a year seems like an irregularity for a global firm that early this year reached the milestone as the second tech firm to chalk up more than $US600 billion in market capitalisation.

The first one was Microsoft and it happened back in the days when Apple was still searching for its soul.

But Apple has been the tech world's perennial winner in the past half-decade and its incredible streak was mostly anchored to an innovative product that Steve Jobs, the company's late CEO and co-founder, described in 2007 as the reinvention of mobile phone - the iPhone.

It was a reinvention indeed, which for Apple created a new dynamic market segment that in the last quarter had delivered for the firm overall quarterly revenues of more than $US35 billion, with safe profits of close to $US9 billion.

Yet the company's centrepiece gadget, the iPhone, only shifted 26 million units as of the end of June 2012, falling behind the more than 35 million iPhones that were sold in the March quarter, also this year.

On the other hand, Samsung, Apple's chief rival at the moment, pushed out some 45 million of Android smartphones and the Asian company is on the roll as it announced last week that more than 10 million Galaxy S3s have been snapped up so far.

If that sales figures would be included in the overall smartphone sales of Samsung, then it is likely that the South Korean company would again be the top seller in the last quarter and the likelihood of seeing the same picture by the September quarter gets stronger as Apple admitted that its iPhone sales have diminished considerably because global consumers were evidently pausing.

Buyers were holding off in upgrading their Apple mobile phones because they would want to save up for the new iPhone model that is set to hit the global market during the holiday quarter.

Such mentality hit hard on Apple's overall sales as Reuters noted that consumers have become accustomed to product cycles that 'outgoing product models' inevitably suffer, in this case the iPhone 4S.

Apple admitted that such a trend exists and noted too that in fact a big part of its June sales can be attributed to its cheaper or discounted devices, meaning consumers who elected to still buy new handsets did so but also decided to save some cash.

The result: Apple hit the mark it set, conservative enough according to market watchers, but they paled in comparison to the bars set by economists.

Most analysts viewed Apple's Q3 figures as generally a miss simply because the market is expecting too much from the tech giant after the awes and wows it generated in the past few years.

The company is now under a pressure cooker as analyst Giri Cherukuri told Reuters on Thursday: "Apple is a little bit more vulnerable ... There are chinks in their armour now."

Previously, Apple top man Tim Cook would not give weight on market projections as he declared in 2009 and with Reuters quoting: "We just spend our time projecting our business and leave the economy forecasting and comments to economists."

This time, however, the Apple CEO was more pliant in accepting that global slowdowns in key markets could also hurt Apple's economic prospects as analysts cautioned that the possibility of Apple becoming an unwilling victim of its own weight and success was not too remote at all.

And it is likely too that Apple's course will refocus again in the final months of 2012 en route to the initial months of the following year.

"We expect headwinds to reverse in the calendar fourth quarter," Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty told Reuters in stressing that the market generally remains upbeat on Apple despite the value drops its stocks suffered this week.