It has not been a good couple of weeks for the world’s most valuable tech company, Apple.

First, LG Display, the largest panel supplier for Apple’s hero products, iPhone and iPad, reported the Cupertino-based company had cut display orders for its mobile devices. That sparked speculation that the iPhone 5 was losing popularity.

Apple yesterday reported its first quarter earnings: It sold 47.8 million iPhones, well short of the 50 million analysts had projected. Its stock plummeted 11 per cent, a sign of growing fears on Wall Street that the company has plateaued.

Even though it regained market share — rising 51.2 per cent versus 44.9 per cent from a year earlier, according to a study by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech released this week — in the United States over the holiday quarter, it was not enough to allay concerns. Google’s Android devices account for three out of every four handsets shipped worldwide.

Could Apple be indeed faced with product fatigue? After all, the company has been rolling out iPhones after iPads (even if it is an iPad Mini), year after year. Critics lament the lack of innovation, which they surmised had gone to the grave with late Apple chief Steve Jobs. The differences between the iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 were so minimal, their rivals parodied them in advertisements.

And where they did try to innovate, they would mess it up, as seen in the Apple Maps debacle.

But analysts are not giving up on the company just yet. Mr Wong Teck Zhung, regional analyst for market researcher IDC’s mobile phone team, said: “Apple’s Q1 results show the company is still growing, with exceptional growth in iPhones — into the triple digits — in Greater China. That’s not a sign of a company that’s over the hill.

“It does face increased competition. In emerging markets such as China, it is competing against low-cost Android devices, and in India, the high price of an iPhone remains prohibitive for consumers. So I would describe Apple as approaching the top of the hill but not yet over,” Mr Wong added.

Mr Rob Cihra, an analyst at Evercore Partners, said: “Sentiment has turned super-pessimistic on Apple, where they’ve gone from being able to do no wrong to suddenly being able to do no right. I tend to think the company’s momentum is a heck of a lot more solid than people are concerned about.”

As an Apple user for close to two decades now, the allure of its product is its simplicity and clean design. When I was doing design layouts with an Apple Macintosh in 1993, I did not want to grapple with user inputs and programming language. I just wanted a machine that could let me design an ad campaign in the shortest time possible. The same philosophy applied when I made the decision to get an iPhone 3G as my first smartphone.

Apple may seem to have lost favour with investors — for now — but fans are still hanging around.

And as long as Apple continues to build products that put its users first over share prices, its future remains bright.

Peter Yeo is a correspondent at TODAY.