For the second straight fiscal 4th quarter earnings report -- and 3rd quarter of out the last 5 -- Apple, Inc. (AAPL), the world's largest company, has come up short of expectations. Earnings per share of $8.67 missed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $8.85 by 2.1%. Revenues came in at $36 billion, slightly above the $35.8 billion expected.

iPhones were the main positive for Apple's Q4: the company sold 26.9 million iPhones, easily beating the estimated 25.3 million. This figure was obviously boosted by the launch in late September of the iPhone 5, but is impressive nevertheless considering the iPhone 5 was only on the market for about a week and a half before the quarter ended.

iPads, Macs and iPods all disappointed sales expectations, with the iPad showing notable weakness: Apple sold "just" 14 million iPad tablets in the quarter; it was expected to have sold 15.8 million. Macs and iPods did not miss by much, but still contributed to the weaker quarter.

Analysts had been all over the place in predicting Apple's EPS numbers. Originally a consensus of $8.41 at the start of the quarter gave way to a big updraft to $8.95 roughly a month later. Just in the past 7 days we'd seen 3 upward estimate revisions for AAPL and 8 downward revisions. Stronger negative sentiment over the past 30 days can also be seen in Zacks consensus estimates for Q1-13 and fiscal 2013.

Obviously, no company is perfect, and no stock keeps going up to infinity. That said, Apple shares have come down around $100 since September, and with a less-than-thrilling earnings report, might we expect shares to come down more in the near term?

After-hours trading was halted for a time, but has since traded down another percentage point or so. This comes after a slight sell-off ahead of earnings, down 1.18% ($7.29) before the bell. Perhaps the call from Tim Cook & Co. can provide some positive sentiment going forward, but the fact remains Apple's had a bite taken out of it for the second quarter in a row.

Read the Full Research Report on AAPL

Zacks Investment Research

More From Zacks.com

• Read the analyst report on AAPL