Perhaps Apple doesn’t feel it needs huge sales of the Apple iPad during the holiday period, as the word is Apple has chopped their component orders for the Apple iPad over the last couple of weeks, a move that could see manufacturing quantities drop to roughly 3 million in the holiday quarter from the 17 million in Q3.

According to the guys over at 9to5 Mac, Bloomberg is reporting the iPad quantity slash and reports…” Several supply-chain vendors indicated in the past two weeks that Apple lowered fourth-quarter iPad orders 25 percent, the first such cut that analysts at JPMorgan’s electronic manufacturing services team in Hong Kong said they have ever seen.”

However, Mark Koskowisz, and analyst for JPMorgan US doesn’t expect to drop his forecast of between 10.9 million and 12 million iOS slates shipped in Q3 and Q4 after these supply chain adjustments.

Apparently there has been no confirmation on the supply chain orders cut from Apple says Taipei based RBS Asia Ltd analyst Wanli Wang, although Wang does suggest that the reduction in orders for the Apple iPad to suppliers could be because of weakening European demand, and further says, “It’s back to reality. Now it seems even for Apple, due to the market situation, we need to be conservative.”

Of course this will lead to the speculation that perhaps Apple is cutting back on Apple iPad 2 orders in preparation for the Apple iPad 3, but that’s likely to be somewhat premature as mass production for the iPad 3 is slated to start in Q1 of 2012.

So there you have it, it looks like Apple doesn’t expect to sell too many iOS slates during the holiday season, perhaps they will be concentrating of pushing sales of the iPhone 5, which is expected to be officially announced on the 4th of October.

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