RUSH: The Apple announcement. Do you want to hear my predictions? I don’t know anything. Nobody does. There are rumors from sources all over the place and some of the sources have credibility, some don’t. But there are certain things that are known. You’re gonna get two phones announced today, and probably both will go on sale on September 19th, 4.7-inch screen, 5.5-inch screen. But that doesn’t even cover half the news of the new phones. IOS 8 will go to gold master today, will be available to the public a week from tomorrow, is my prediction.
And iOS 8 is awesome. IOS 8, when they released the new upgrade to the Macintosh, which is Yosemite, they ought to do it on the same day. They won’t, but they should because they’ve got a new thing called Continuity that unites the phones, the iPads, and the computers in amazing ways. But apparently Yosemite is not gonna be ready until October when Apple will have another announcement to introduce whatever’s new with the Mac.
There might be a new iPad introduced today. If so, it will be a minor upgrade with a touch ID fingerprint sensor on it and a “home” button and maybe a little lighter and a little thinner, nothing more major, which, since it’s not a major thing they might get it out of the way today rather than a special iPad event in October, make the October event strictly Mac. Apple TV, who knows, probably next year, not ready today because they don’t have a deal with TV content providers. Unless there’s a giant — I mean, there’s all kinds of surprises coming today.
Mayo Clinic supposedly on stage to help Apple introduce the new health app. This could be big. ABC News is doing a special tonight at 6:30 on historic occurrences at this Apple thing today. An historic event happening. ABC’s promoting it. Now, keep in mind ABC is Disney, and Apple, Steve Jobs’ widow, is the largest Disney shareholder. Bob Iger, the Disney CEO, is on the Apple board. So there is some synergy there.
But ABC is hyping this, whatever it is today, as historic with a special tonight at 6:30. People think it’s the new mobile payments thing. If that’s true, Apple today will begin to obsolete the credit card, and you will pay at point-of-sale with an app on your phone or whatever this thing that’s being called the iWatch. And I, you know, let me tell you something. I have no idea what it is. If ABC’s billing this as historic, there’s more than a couple of bigger phones and a watch going on here. I mean, a watch is a new product category. What’s historic? Mobile payments might be historic.
This is something that Google has tried, it hasn’t worked. PayPal, it hasn’t taken off. Apple comes in, they don’t start something. They wait until something gets going and they come out and improve it and make it better than ever. Mobile payments, phones, iPads. Well, that was a new category. The watch, everybody’s out there trying the watch and failing at it. Who knows what it is. These are just my predictions.
If the new phones are your big deal, I think a week from Friday they’ll go on sale, 4.7 in plentiful supply, 5.5 will be tough to get like last year’s gold iPhone 5s. But you’ll be able to get one if you know somebody like I do. (laughing) Other than that, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Apple’s live streaming it today, and I bet if this were on television, it would rate as high as Obama’s speech on ISIS tomorrow night, if it were in prime time. That’s how much eager anticipation there is for this thing. It’s been an incredible hype job. Mayo Clinic reportedly on stage. They are a signatory already to the Apple health app. You know, this is the thing that tells you you’re out of shape. I won’t need it. I already know that. But a lot of people are going nuts over the health thing, and apparently Mayo Clinic is going to be there on stage helping to introduce whatever this is.
Mayo Clinic’s not insignificant. That’s pretty big. Apple with Mayo today, exactly right. They’ve invited, by the way, for you watch people, Apple has invited fashion industry elite as guests to this thing. They’re not there for phones. They’re not there for iPads. No, it’s not gonna be a typical looking watch. I’m not even sure it’s going to be a watch. With ABC hyping this as historic, phones and watches and stuff are not historic. So we’ll just have to wait and see like everybody else.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Mr. Snerdley, what were you gonna ask? (interruption) Of the Apple announcement? (interruption) Well, I’m not surprised. Everything so far in the Apple announcement is exactly as sources that I trust have suggested it would be. We got two phones, 5.5 inches, 4.7 inches. They’re great. IOS 8, I told you, would be out a week from now. It will be.
The new phones will be out, both sizes, on Friday the 19th. Pre-order on the 12th, and, yep, right now they’re into Apple Pay. This is the new wallet that’s going to make credit cards obsolete. They’re actually making a serious move into mobile payments. I have no idea (I’m watching right now) how it’s gonna work.
I’m assuming that there’s gonna be a special enclave on a special chip in the phone — or the watch, whatever the hell it’s gonna be. Your credit card numbers and data will all be, everything on the magnetic strip and your card number will go on that enclave. It’s only on your phone that nobody can get to. And then there will be an app on the phone that will talk to the payment-acceptance device at the establishment, the restaurant or the store, whatever.
What they’re gonna have to do in order to keep all of this really secure is use a token, a one-time token that actually transmits the data from your phone to the receiving device at the business, and once the token’s used, it’s invalid and is gone into the ether and therefore people nearby can’t steal your credit card data. They’re gonna have to do something like tokenize this.
They just can’t put your credit card numbers over the air, either NFC or Bluetooth, whatever. So I suspect that’s how they’re gonna do it. And if they pull this off, they’ve got 800 credit cards on file with iTunes and they’ve already made a deal with American Express and some others. So they could pull this off. That might be what is the historic aspect of this, according to ABC.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I saw enough of the Apple Watch intro, it does look compelling, I have to say. It looks like a marvel of engineering. It does more than a hundred watches combined, it looks like. I still don’t know if I want one ’cause I already know I’m out of shape.