As with most numbers about products in the tech market, there should have been some caveats to every story that wrote about IDC’s report on Tuesday that Android-based tablets would overtake the iPad in 2013. Predictably there weren’t.

The biggest point that should have been made is that IDC is predicting that “shipments” of Android tablets will top the iPad. That’s shipments, not sales.

I’ve had a number of people ask me about the report, some concerned that recent reports of Apple not doing well may be true. I’m not concerned.

The simple fact is, companies can ship as many products as they want into the channel, but that doesn’t mean they will sell them. Many companies just report the shipped numbers because they are higher than what they actually sold, so it looks better to investors.

Apple typically has trouble filling all the demand for their products. It would be wrong to assume that the company is holding back on its production because the numbers prove that’s not the case.

Just look at the last quarterly results when people were saying that Apple lost its mojo. Apple sold a record 47.8 million iPhones; a record 22.9 million iPads; posted record quarterly revenue of $54.5 billion; and record quarterly net profit of $13.1 billion.

Where exactly is Apple losing?

Ben Bajarin wrote a great piece about this yesterday too. Definitely worth a read.