They probably put together a production cut plan just in case (as they should), and then someone finds out about it and assumes that because they made a plan to do a thing, that they're going to do a thing.

Popular thinking can't really wrap its head around risk management.

The normal Apple analysis people/sites have been discussing this. You can run into things where Apple likes to have multiple suppliers, so maybe they decide to cut their order with supplier A by 50% because they don’t think they’re doing well enough where they can get a better price somewhere else.

Supplier A talks to a friend in the media and all of a sudden the story is that Apple has a big problem because their new phone isn’t selling.

What no one is saying (possibly because as we all know Apple like secrecy and repolish them) is that supplier B had a 30% increase in orders from Apple, or supplier C is now coming online when they weren’t involved before.

Since we don’t have the whole picture, it’s hard to know what’s actually going on outside of effectively one rumor.

Or it could be stock manipulation.

What are the actual numbers? They added a new product: a high-end phone. Maybe they aren’t selling as many of the expensive product that they weren’t selling the year before?

The simple fact that they had no idea how it would sell could mean they asked suppliers to be ready at the high-end of expectations.

and this happens every year as they always cut them down after the initial major release.