Officially, the disaster in Japan did not affect Apple and the company's ability to produce millions of iDevices monthly did not suffer. Unofficially Apple has already invested impressive amounts of money to ensure that it has enough to produce many iPad 2 tablets and will invest more to ensure that it will continue to have. Apparently Apple will use 11 billion of the 66 billion available to conclude some contracts with certain suppliers of components for the iPad 2 and maybe the iPhone 5.
Tim Cook admitted during last week's conference for the presentation of financial results that Apple would have liked to sell at least 2 times more iPad 2 tablets than it did, so an investment in components is logical. Apple makes such strategic investments to ensure that it has a constant supply of cheap components for its iDevices, but $11 billion is an impressive figure even for Apple. It seems that certain suppliers in Asia will have the opportunity to collect part of this money and iPad 2 and iPhone 5 will be available in sufficient quantities in the future.
This week Apple will launch iPad 2 in 13 more countries and stocks will probably be affected again, but until the release of iPhone 5 everything should "settle down" and stores probably won't be surrounded by Chinese people looking for iPad 2.
