IPhone 5: What Apple investors need to know - MarketWatch (blog)

September 13, 2012, 1:25 PM

The iPhone 5. I wish they had called it the New iPhone. What are we going to have, an iPhone 48 someday? It’ll be tough to continue convincing people to upgrade the higher the model number goes. They could have just kept calling each one the “new iPhone” like they did with the “new iPad” and that way you either have the latest or not. Better than trying to remember which number is the latest.

But whatever. The whole key to investing in Apple /quotes/zigman/68270 /quotes/nls/aapl AAPL is, as I’ve been saying for almost a decade now, to recognize that you’re riding an entire platform/eco-system. The new iPhone, I mean the iPhone 5, along with the new iPods and iTunes that Apple released yesterday definitely build on that.

And the little things like more effective battery life and 4G capabilities are huge. The amount of Internet usage on the iPhone will continue to climb exponentially.

By the way, that usage is very profitable for the carriers who finally figured out that the All-You-Can-Eat model was a loser in a world where Internet bandwidth is the bottleneck now that the iMini-MacBookPro-for-your-pocket is a reality with the iPhone 5 being more functional and fun than an actual laptop. And that means that the carriers are going to be all the more aggressive about trying to get these iPhone 5s out the door.

And finally, probably the single biggest news from the iPhone event yesterday is that the iPhone 5 will be out and for sale in more than 100 countries and nearly 250 different carriers by December. That’s going to make the Apple platform a de facto standard for tens of millions more people this year than it would have otherwise. And those people will, like most of the rest of us who have already moved to the Apple platform over the years, stick with the Apple platform and start buying other Apple products and so on and so forth.

The virtuous cycle continues.

I’m sticking with Apple as my largest position as it has been for years.

And if you’d like some background on this type of analysis, be sure to check out my new book, “Everything You Need to Know About Investing” where I explain in great detail the analysis I used to first buy Apple at $7 a share back in 2003.

Cody Willard writes Revolution Investing for MarketWatch and posts the trades from his personal account at TradingWithCody.com. At time of publication, Cody was net long Apple and Google. Follow Cody on Twitter at twitter.com/codywillard. Cody’s #1 best-selling Amazon book, “Everything You Need to Know About Investing,”, is available in digital and in paperback.