With the caveat that it’s always dangerous to attribute reason to something as irrational as the stock market, this is how it looked to me:

• The stock opened strong — despite a wishy-washy Goldman Sachs note and a bizarre Jim Cramer rant — on news that Tim Cook’s apology to China seemed to have done the trick .
• Then, around 1:30 p.m., something simultaneously goosed the volume and killed the buzz. My candidate: A story in the Wall Street Journal that said Apple had begun production on a new iPhone 5-size phone for delivery this summer.

Analysts have been been talking about this phone for weeks. Heck, they’ve already nicknamed it: the iPhone 5S. But there’s something about a headline in the Journal that has the power to move the market, even if it doesn’t manage move the story forward.

The stock ended where it started, at $429.79, up $0.88 (0.21%) for the day.