Analyst: iPhone 5 with LTE to be biggest catalyst for Apple this year

Apple’s likely got a series of updates in the pipeline for this year. At the very least, we’ll likely see a new iPhone and iPad, just like every other year since their first release; however, could the Apple Television (iTV) provide more of a catalyst for the company? The iPhone will still be Apple’s best source for revenue in 2012 according to Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu.

Quoted from BGR:

[The iPhone] is arguably the single most important of AAPL’s businesses representing 44% of revenue in FY11 and what we estimate to be at least 60% of profits,” Wu wrote on Wednesday. “It also has the largest unit opportunity with a yearly TAM (total addressable market) of 1.5 billion mobile phones.

The findings aren’t exactly unexpected. Anyone with an Apple blog and a traffic analyzer could tell you that the iPhone and iPad provide far more traffic than news about desktops, televisions, and other Apple products. Rumor posts about the yet-to-be-announced iPhone or iPad can bring an explosion of traffic. So far we’ve yet to see a similar response for an Apple television post here on Macgasm.

We’ve had a poll going in our sidebar for just over two weeks now that asks our readers what they’re most excited for in 2012 and the results are staggeringly in favour of new iOS devices. It’s far from a definitive conclusion, but 68.3 percent of our readers are most excited for the next iOS device. Compare those numbers with just 17.43 percent of our readers looking forward to an Apple Television and it becomes increasingly obvious that mobile iOS devices rule the day at Apple.

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld… Full Bio