Apple's Retina iPad mini was unexpected till the very last moment, at the company's big Fall 2013 event, where it launched the iPad Air, among other stuff. It's rumored that Apple had to swallow its pride to strike last-minute deals with Samsung, and that could limit its supply.

　　Apple gave the Retina iPad mini a late-November market availability window. At Apple's Q3-2013 earnings call held on Monday (28/10), CEO Tim Cook admitted that his company won't have enough Retina iPad mini to sell for this quarter. "...it's unclear whether we'll have enough for the quarter or not," said Cook, adding "we know how many we'll have," but that it's difficult to predict demand for the tablet.

　　Duh? It's a 7.9-inch tablet with a 2048 x 1536-pixel display, and practically the same innards as the bigger iPad Air, including an Apple A7 SoC, M7 sensor chip, and the latest iOS 7 operating system. There's got to be some takers for that?

　　To summarize, Apple's Retina iPad mini will be a very short sell. There might not be enough of them to go around for Apple, and it's not recommending it as an X'mas present, hence the late-November availability, so it appears to have quickly sold out under the holiday shopping rush, and Apple is absolved of shoddy production practices.