RUSH: To the phones. Nathan, San Jose, California. I’m glad you called, Nathan. I appreciate your waiting, too. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Yeah, I’m a lone Republican here in San Jose, California. Whenever my wife and I go to vote and I say I’m Republican, I get a dirty look by the election judges. (chuckling) So —
RUSH: I totally understand. Totally.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: I was a Republican in California once, too. I know exactly.
CALLER: Right. So I’ve been a listener of your show ever since my dad introduced me when he first got your book, The Way Things Ought to Be. My dad would tape your TV show. He had to find it at midnight in our local Chicago area when I was growing up. My dad raised us well, you know, with Republican ideals about self-reliance and not taking anything from the government. I live out here in California now, and a lot of people out here have that mentality that they want to get something from the government.
But I primarily called to talk to you about the latest Apple products and about tech here, because I work in the tech industry. I don’t work for Apple but I work for a test and measurement company that’s just right down the street from Apple, and they come to us as well as Google. They come to us saying, “How do we test our latest equipment before we get it on to the shelves?” Without going into a lot of details, the future out there is going to be more and more of these mobile-type devices from Apple. I know you’re a huge Apple fan and so am I, and my wife is a huge fan. We’re wanting an iPad and all that stuff, but the future is gonna be really wearable products.
RUSH: You mean like Google Glass?
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: And the iWatch and things like that?
CALLER: Right. We had Sebastian Thrun from Google come to our company, and he demonstrated Google Glass for us, and we got to play around with it. You know, you get to take pictures with it. It’s very futuristic. You kind of feel strange wearing it but you walk into walls and stuff like that because you’re doing text messaging.
RUSH: Not to mention you look weird.
CALLER: That’s true. You look like the Borg from Star Trek.
RUSH: You look like a zombie.
CALLER: That’s right, yeah. People are already walking into water fountains, text messaging and bumping into people in the hallways. With text messaging, it’s gonna get worse with people driving cars.
RUSH: Hang on. Don’t go away here.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, we’re back with Nathan in San Jose, California, who works at a high-tech testing company. He tests high-tech gear.
CALLER: Tests and measurements. Yeah. We make test equipment. We were formerly part of Hewlett-Packard.
RUSH: I see. All right. Well, you want to know what I think? You talk about Google Glass and future stuff in high-tech. I tell you, your call is actually kind of well timed, because you talk about Google and Google Glass.
CALLER: That’s right. Yeah.
RUSH: Google is in bed with Obama! Google is instructing the Democrat Party how to use high-tech for information gathering, and guess who they’re gathering information on? Their opponents.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: I mean, Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin and these guys made no bones about the fact they love Obama. They’re in bed with Obama. They’re in bed with the Democrat Party like all of Silicon Valley is. They’re in it for one reason: to be close to power, to be the reason power exists. They want to be the high financiers of power, because that gives them power. It’s not about ideas. I get so many people asking me… Nathan, don’t go away.
I get so many people asking me, “But if these guys are Big Business-types, Rush, why are they for Big Government?” It’s called crony capitalism. It’s called being at the seat of power without having to be elected! You buy your way in there, and then you’re able to shape whatever comes out of Washington to your benefit without having to go through the work of being elected and getting into the political process at all. You just buy your way in there.
So it is about ideas but you’re buying your ideas and you’re having your allegiance to a political party, and whatever happens to anybody else is irrelevant. You want to make sure there’s enough wealth transfer so that customers have enough money to go out and buy your Google Glass, or buy the ads that Google is actually selling with all this stuff. That’s the way they make their money, but it’s insidious, this big California tech concern in bed with Obama. Look at Apple.
Just two weeks ago, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, was brought up to Congress. Here you have the most profitable business, even more profitable and bigger than Exxon, and they are paying more taxes than any company in America, and yet they’re brought up and made to explain why they aren’t paying more. Now, what that was really all about was, “Hey, you know, you guys are making a hell of a lot of money and you better start spending it here.”
It’s the equivalent of a shakedown. So what happens? What does Tim Cook do? Within three weeks, he hires Lisa Jackson, the ex-EPA administrator, who was one of these Obama people with the fake, phony e-mail address. This woman is an absolute tunnel-visioned environmentalist wacko. This woman believes that humanity and automobiles and carbon and all of the things that constitute growth in an economy are suspects. She criminalizes as much of this as she can.
She ran the EPA as a rogue administrator. She was issuing her own regulations, her own orders, her own indoctrinations. “To hell with it!” She had Obama’s full support. I’m telling you, folks… Now, I’m not saying she’s an idiot, but intellectually she’s as wrong on what she believes as possible. It doesn’t matter. To her it’s a religious belief. She is a classic, hypocritical leftist. Anyway, what did Apple do? They hired her. To do what?
Supervise their “green” efforts, because Apple has a lot of data centers to run their iCloud operation and they’re building the world’s largest solar panel arrays in this country, and so Lisa Jackson has been hired ostensibly to offer Apple guidance on how to do it right in terms of the environment. So there’s one example of how Washington works. I hope to hell she doesn’t really have anything to say about what they do with that company, ’cause if that happens (sigh), that’d be depressing. Now, Nathan, before you go… Are you still there?
CALLER: Yup.
RUSH: Good. I have people… You know, Apple has its worldwide developer conference coming up on Monday. Now, let’s be honest. Apple hasn’t had any new products. They haven’t even had an announcement in 210 days.
CALLER: Right. They’re very mum on what they’re working on.
RUSH: People that have iPhones and iPads, they love Apple. It’s almost a cult. But they’re worried out there ’cause Samsung seems to have a new phone every week, Motorola seems to have a new phone every week, HTC seems to have a new phone every week. They have all these new features, and Apple hasn’t done anything in 210 days. So there’s a lot of concern.
CALLER: Without Steve Jobs, they’ve lost their primary innovator. You know, the brain trust, they left. So they are looking for ideas.
RUSH: I don’t think that’s what’s going on here.
CALLER: But he was a visionary, though.
RUSH: I don’t think that’s it. Jobs was great, don’t misunderstand. It’s a huge loss. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on here at all. I just think Apple’s gotten bigger than they ever thought they would get. I don’t think they can meet their demand. I don’t think they can meet the demand for their products.
CALLER: I’m still bullish on Apple. I think that the next big thing is gonna be the wearable devices. If Google’s got the glasses, which are kind of funky, the next thing is to be… You know, and I’m old enough to know what Dick Tracy wore.
RUSH: The iWatch, I know. Nathan I’m gonna tell you: I have people who know I’m an Apple fan. They ask, “What do you think’s gonna happen at the developers conference next week?” People who know there hasn’t been a new iPad or a new iPhone are hoping and praying, “Is there gonna be some new gadget?” So what everybody’s looking at is they’re gonna have an upgrade on the software that runs the iPhone and the iPad.
It’s supposedly gonna have a new look because the industrial designer, Jony Ive, has been put in charge of software design now as well as hardware design, and, if you read the bloggers — as you well know, Nathan — the bloggers hate skeuomorphism. Snerdley, do you know what skeuomorphism is? (interruption) You don’t. Skeuomorphism is on your iPad, the notes application, looks like a yellow legal pad. That’s skeuomorphism.
The tech bloggers hate skeuomorphism. They hate the game center looking like a green, felt-covered pool table. They hate the calendar with fake leather at the top of it. They hate it. The blogger tech people hate skeuomorphism and they’ve been on the anti-skeuomorphism — I don’t know — crusade for a couple of years. So everybody’s convinced that Jony Ive hates it, too, and he’s gonna come out with a flat, basically black and white-looking operating system. Cleaner.
People know that I’m a big-time Apple aficionado, and they want to know what I think’s gonna happen at the worldwide developer conference. I’ll tell you right now this is what I think is gonna… Oh, another thing! The Mac Pro, which is their big professional computer for video and film editors? It’s the most powerful computer for it, and they haven’t upgraded that thing in three years. It had a minor speed bump, but it’s not even got the latest technology. It’s three years late on the latest technology.
So everybody thinks there’s gonna be a new one of those. I was thinking of what all could happen at their developer conference, and I think maybe they might announce a new Mac Pro. They’ll say that it is going to be available later this fall. They won’t specify a date. In September, they’ll say that a configuration of the new Mac Pro that nobody really wants will go on sale in mid-October. They will then announce the configuration of the new Mac Pro that everybody wants will not hit until November.
Then when it hits in November, it’ll come with a shipping time of three to four weeks. Then when three to four weeks hits, one or two will be available. They’ll say, “Well, we’ve got some shortages due to the unforeseen demand,” and the units will actually ship in mid-December. But at a trickle. Most deliveries delayed until January when the new iPhone 5S will finally be available. The iPhone 5S will be announced in September with ship dates in five to seven days.
They’ll sell five million in the first three days and they won’t any for the next three months. The iPhone 5S will have new quantities finally available in January. It’ll also be delayed, the 5S, because the bloggers will be upset that there’s still too much skeuomorphism in it. So Ive will have to go back to the drawing board to make it flatter to satisfy the tech bloggers. So the 5S and iOS 7, the new software system… Look for nothing before December, is the bottom line here, folks. OS X 10.9, the new software for your computer?
They’ll announce that and its availability sometime in July.
It’ll ship on February 30th of next year.
Nathan, thanks for the call.
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