Sticking With Wormy Apple

While I'm on the AT&T (T - commentary - Cramer's Take) Wireless topic, let's touch on what the implications of my prior post are for Apple (AAPL - commentary - Cramer's Take) and its new iPhone, which will only be available from AT&T Wireless.

AT&T Wireless' horrid service does have some minor implications in this for Apple, the main one being that the company is tying its renowned brand to this bad service. The reasons for Apple going with AT&T are rather straightforward, in that the company wanted to go with GSM-technology, which meant it needed to use either AT&T or the even worse Deutsche Telekom (DT - commentary - Cramer's Take) T-Mobile.

That said, I don't think customers will in general blame Apple for bad voice services and it's not like any wireless data service works smoothly on any handheld, through Verizon (VZ - commentary - Cramer's Take) or elsewhere. So expectations for data are pretty low. And since Apple's purportedly including the first truly HTML-browser in the phone, the ability to leverage that standard will make the data experience on the phone better than most anyway.

While we're on the Apple and brand stance, one more item to note: I discussed with Aaron Task in today's video interview (click here to watch the clip) how Steve Jobs has also put his and Apple's brand credibility at risk by backtracking on all his explanations of how 128 kbps tracks were as good as we'd need -- and now he wants us to pay for "premium" quality. Is that paint rustproof, Steve?

You know I already thought the credibility of Steve and Apple had taken a hit with the options backdating scam still open and full of holes and questions. Regardless of all these issues, Apple's brand is as strong as any consumer brand out there right now and that's in large part because its products used to work somewhat more reliably than those of its biggest competitors, those Wintel folks. But now my Apple MacBook Pro and my iMac are no more reliable than my Dells or Toshiba Wintel machines. Vista's more reliable than Mac OS from my experiences with both of late.

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Cody Willard is the manager of CL Willard Capital Management, LLC. He is a regular guest on Fox News, CNBC and other networks, and he writes a monthly column for the Financial Times. He is also an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University and the author of TheCodyReport.net, a monthly stock market newsletter. Willard appreciates your feedback -- click here to send him an email.