q1 2013

Verizon just posted their first quarter 2013 financial results, and during the conference call their chief financial officer announced that 4 million iPhones had been sold in the quarter, 2 million of which were iPhone 5. That's a pretty significant number, considering Verizon activated 7.2 million devices the whole quarter, making iPhone accountable for over 55%. CEO Lowell McAdam commented on Verizon's progress this quarter:

Here we go again. Another Apple quarter that demonstrates long term strength in its business, and another quarter where Wall Street is waving its hands in the air claiming that the business is broken. Apple shares are down over $50 (10%) as I write this.

Always remember value investor Benjamin Graham’s famous expression: In the short term the market acts like a voting machine. In the long term it acts like a weighing machine. Today, the voting machine dominates. But over the course of many product cycles, those daily votes amount to nothing. That’s why the market is volatile, and why I focus on long term investing.

As part of their Q1 2013 conference call, Apple's CEO Tim Cook announced that the iPhone 5 would gain LTE 4G data service on 36 additional carriers next week. The iPhone 5 currently enjoys LTE on carriers in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. Korea, Germany, and Japan, among others. Slower than anticipated global LTE rollouts, however, have kept the numbers relatively low.

During today's Q1 2013 conference call, Apple's CEO Tim Cook was asked about larger screened iPhones. There were two separate questions, one about price and screen size variants and how they might effect Apple's business outside the US, and the the other concerning how competitors use screen size to differentiate from Apple, and whether there are dynamics or long term cases for a bigger screened iPhone.