Image Is Everything So Apple Should Pull Products From Walmart, Target Too

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Two articles I wrote this week lead perfectly into this one.

Next to Jim Cramer and Howard Stern, I'm the most misunderstood man in showbiz.

Most recently, there was Cheaper Apple iPhone Would Trigger Tim Cook's Departure. That set off a firestorm of but Apple would dominate with a low-end iPhone, especially in emerging markets.

Believe it or not, I agree. But I still don't think they should do a "cheap" -- stress the word "cheap" -- iPhone. Not in price. Not in quality. And the rumor mills say Apple plans to compromise on both.

Before the iPhone article, there was Apple Should Fire Another Nail Into Best Buy's Coffin, where I argue that Apple (AAPL) should pull its products from the hapless retailer.

Again, intuitive yowls of you're nuts, why would Apple remove products from a store that makes them money?.

As I explained at my growing Twitter feed, it stuns me that so many people misunderstand what made/makes Apple successful.

Time for another multi-method stock market ethnography.

On the "cheap" iPhone rumors: I said explicitly I do not believe they are true. We have the same sort of ultimately inaccurate media hysteria happening with this as we did iPad mini. Watch my CNBC appearance where I detailed, before it went down, exactly how things with the iPad mini would go down:

Most others provided hot air. I told you what Apple would do.

Replace "iPad mini" with "cheap iPhone" in that video and you have my feelings here, which, interestingly, Apple SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller appears to agree with (Credit The Next Web with the story and thanks to Twitter follower @frankymv1 for alerting me to it). Here's what Schiller said in response to these rumors that I, increasingly, want to call idiotic:

[A cheaper iPhone will] never be the future of Apple products.

There. Is that clear enough?

And who would have ever thought a.) it would be the future or, worse yet, b.) should be the future of Apple products? While we cannot call Schiller's comments a unilateral squashing of the rumor, I hope it ends up as such. A "cheaper iPhone" has no place whatsoever in Apple's future. Not even a small part of it.

You see, one already exists. Two in fact. They're called the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S. Sort of like buying a 2009 Mercedes instead of the 2013 model.

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