El Rushbo on the Apple iCloud

RUSH: We’re gonna go to Baltimore. We’ll start with Sean. Nice to have you. You are up first, and welcome to the program, sir.

CALLER: Hey, how’s it going, Rush?

RUSH: Hi.

CALLER: Am I allowed to give you liberal dittos?

RUSH: By all means.

CALLER: Okay, well, I’m a liberal caller but I was telling Snerdley I don’t have any problem with you. I love your show. I listen all the time, and I’m not gonna rib you or anything. I don’t always agree with your politics, but I think the show is great. What I’m calling about today was the Apple iCloud that’s supposed to be announced next week.

RUSH: Yeah, Monday I think.

CALLER: Supposedly it’s going to be announced. What are your thoughts on that? Is it gonna be a good thing? Is it gonna blow everything else away? I think it will because Apple, they build almost flawless products but —

RUSH: You know, it’s amazing to me, I was looking at the subject line of your call on my monitor here before taking the call, and I was thinking Apple seems to be living a charmed existence right now. They seem incapable of making a big corporate mistake. Even, you know, the Antennagate with the iPhone 4 they recovered from. Wasn’t that big a deal. Everything I’m reading about Cloud, you know, it’s gonna start off $25 introductory price, or maybe free for a while to get people using it. I think it’s gonna catch on fast. I’m reading today where the real first victim is gonna be research and motion, the BlackBerry people because what the Cloud is gonna do is end up really accelerating the entire push technology.

Right now the one selling point that BlackBerryhasis push e-mail between units. You send somebody else that has a BlackBerry an email and they get it the moment you send it. It doesn’t go to a server. It just goes right to the device from one device to the next, doesn’t gothrough any other server. This Cloud business is gonna free up people’s storage on their local devices. The only drawback here that I can see at first is gonna be whatever download speeds people have with their Internet connection. If the majority of the their video and audio is coming from servers they better have a speedy connection to avoid buffering of video and this kind of thing. But yeah, I think it’s revolutionary.

CALLER: Cool. Well, thanks.

RUSH: What do you think?

CALLER: I can’t wait. I’m just a little worried that, you know, the labels are gonna — ’cause I download a lot of music, that they’re gonna want me to pay even more because they seem kind of greedy, the labels do, from —

RUSH: Oh.

CALLER: I’ve heard stories that they’re gonna try to charge you again for something you already downloaded just to stream to your own device. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but —

RUSH: One way or the other, yeah, I think it’s gonna cost — what did I see today? And again this is all just speculation. Apple still has some deals to negotiate with record labels that could cost ’em as much as an additional $150 million to close. And they’ll pass that on at some point. But I don’t think when they announce this and inaugurate the service, it isn’t gonna cost you much. That’s how they’ll rope you in.

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RUSH: Nobody really knows yet what Apple’s gonna do with the iCloud. We’ll know it next week, but the rumor is that they’re going to offer music streaming from the Cloud free for a limited time and then charge $25 a year for the service. Now, that’s in the LA Times.

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RUSH: The last caller wanted to know what I thought of the Cloud, which is supposed to be announced by Apple — well, it will be announced at their worldwide developers conference in San Francisco next week at the Moscone Center. What they’re gonna be announcing, the latest software rev which will be Lion OS X 10.7. And then iOS 5 which is the software operating system for all the mobile devices, the iPad, the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and then the Cloud. And the Cloud, basically you have iTunes and you’ve got music and television shows and movies on it, all that stuff is going to go onto a server somewhere off site. You’ll no longer have to keep it on your hard drives, freeing up all kinds of storage space if you want to, which means that you won’t have to start syncing everything every time you want a song or a movie on your mobile device from your main master computer.

Your iPhone, your iPad, your iPod Touch will be able to access all your music wherever you have an Internet connection. It will also enable Apple’s ability to spy on you even better. I’m just kidding! I’m just — he-he-he-he-he — just throwing that in there. I mean they already have a cloud. They already got this in a way, it’s called MobileMe. And you can already buy storage not for your music or movies. You can put it there, but not operationally, so it’s just a giant server farm. I’m your average, run-of-the-mill consumer on this stuff, and I know if you try to watch video streamed from off site you better have a fast connection or it’s gonna buffer on you or pixilate or what have you. So I don’t know how that’s gonna work out for people that don’t have a fast broadband connection. If they’re working on 3G cellular connection, I don’t know how it’s gonna work.

I’ve got a couple programs from my iPad and the iPhone, it’s called iTV, a company called Elgato. It’s really cool. It connects to one of my DirecTV receivers at home, and I can watch live television off one of my DirecTV receivers at home wherever I am on the iPad or on the iPhone. I can also record programs just like you do on DirecTV and access those. So, for example, when I’m flying to Hawaii, I’ve got like JetBlue has, DirecTV on EIB 1, but you lose it outside the Continental United States. So flying over to Hawaii what I do is I fire up the iPad if I want to watch television and I watch it from home on the iPad. Now, that’s a satellite Wi-Fi connection, and some days it’s not as fast as it is other days. Some days it pixelates. Some days it buffers. Some days the connection’s not fast enough at all to handle it, so it’s not consistent, depends on a lot of variables, and I would assume the Apple Cloud is gonna have the same problems to deal with.

But I also assume — (interruption) EyeTV, and there’s another one called Air Video, which allows you also to access things that — (interruption) you need to buy a piece of hardware equipment. It’s not just an app. There’s more to it. It is the app but you need a hardware connection in order to make this work, but it’s cool, really is. So essentially I already have Cloud capability with my iPhone or iPad, and so does everybody else who has this app, has it connected. So you’re gonna be able to access whatever you’ve already purchased on any device because it will be on servers out there, i.e., on the Cloud. And it has the potential to move everything on your computer off site if you want it to at some point. And a lot of people get worried about security, circumstances like that, which is a legitimate concern. I don’t know anything more about it than what I’ve told you. Like everybody else we’ll have to wait for the big announcement and see what it is.

And there arerumors going back and forth, is there gonna be a new iPhone or not? There always is a new iPhone in June. No, no, no, the new iPhone will be put off ’til September or October, but they are gonna tell us about the new software that will show up in the phone at this conference. So that’s what the last caller was asking, a perfect Open Line Friday question, ideal Open Line Friday question.

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