RUSH: I don’t know if you’ve heard this or not. The environmentalist whackos are very worried, very concerned that there are so many iPads out there coupled with iPhones, that the pressure on electricity generating power plants is too much. That if people keep buying iPhones, we’re not going to have the ability to power them all. Do you know what it costs you to keep your iPad fully charged for the year? $1.36. That’s what it costs you, everybody.
“The annual cost to charge an iPad is just $1.36, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a non-profit research and development group funded by electric utilities. By comparison, a 60-watt compact fluorescent bulb costs $1.61, a desktop PC adds up to $28.21 and a refrigerator runs you $65.72.” Now, your air conditioning and other stuff really adds up. But your iPad, hand-held computer devices, chump change.
This is an AP story, by the way, so it probably costs less than $1.36. The AP reporter, Jonathan Fahey, says that: “If the number of iPads triples from the current 67 million, they would need the electricity from one small power plant operating at full strength. But if people are using iPads instead of televisions to play video games, or ditching their desktop computers for iPads, the shift to tablets could mean lower overall power consumption. A desktop computer uses 20 times more power than an iPad.” And yet the environmentalist whackos are trying to zero in on the iPad as an environmental threat. And they’re zeroing in on it simply because it’s popular. They’re setting the stage for somewhere down the road suggesting we limit the sales of these things, destroying the planet, climate change or what have you. So somebody’s run the numbers on it and, as usual, it’s another faux crisis from the environmentalist whackos.
Now this takes us to Christian in Mesa, Arizona. You’re calling about iOS 6, the new operating system for the new iPad and iPhone, right?
CALLER: Yes, sir. I was just wondering your opinion on it.
RUSH: You have it? Are you running the beta?
CALLER: I am not. No. I have the iPhone 4 and I haven’t seen it for my model yet. So I haven’t seen it yet.
RUSH: Well, the iOS 6 is going to run on your iPhone 4. I just thought maybe you might have a developer copy of the beta that’s out there.
CALLER: No, I know you’re a big guru on Apple products, so I thought you might have some insight on the new features that they have.
RUSH: I do, plenty of insight on the features. They’re monumental. There’s not a whole lot of visual pizzazz. They’re not changing the home screen. One of the things that has me really curious, I won’t get too esoteric, but I’ll mention it anyway. Last year Apple hired some young guy who had put together a hack of the iPhone home screen and multi-tasking. And it was a brilliant way of genuine multi-tasking rather than just the multi-tasking bar that keeps your recently used apps available to you at the bottom of the screen. This was genuine multiple apps open at the same time, go back and forth to them, just like on your laptop or desktop.
They hired that kid. They hired this kid because what he had done was so revolutionary. And I was confident that why hire the kid if you’re going to use what he had done. Everything I have seen about the new iOS for the iPhone and iPad doesn’t say a word about this, that the home screen isn’t changing. The springboard, nothing really new there. But there are a lot of things operationally about the software that are light years ahead of what happens now. One of the things that they’ve done, they’re in a battle with Google. You know Jobs said that he would go thermonuclear war to destroy Google because they had stolen the whole iPhone and iOS concept when they created Android.
Google makes its money off search. Maps are a fundamental aspect of search. Apple is getting rid of Google Maps in iOS 6. They’re gone. They bought three map companies. One was a 3-D rendering company using Vector. And it apparently is over the top. In fact, it is. I’ve seen it. It will blow your mind. It’s going to have turn-by-turn navigation, which Google Maps for Android does have now. It’s going to be in addition to the iOS 6. It’s going to have that. The one thing it’s not going to have that some of these fan boys are upset about, it’s not going to have street level view like Google Maps does. But that’s just because a bunch of noisy twerps want to spy on people. So it’s not going to have street level. But the maps apparently — well, they’ve only got four or five cities, I think, or six in this beta. San Francisco, Chicago, I forget which. But it is stunning. It’s going to be one of the major selling points. I don’t think you’re going to be disappointed in it at all.
CALLER: Thank you for taking my call.
RUSH: Did I answer your question or did it inspire further questions?
CALLER: No, it was very good. I’m just wondering how this whole maps (unintelligible) Google (unintelligible) is going to run.
RUSH: Nobody knows, but Google will probably attempt to have a app authorized by Apple that you can download called Google Maps, but you will be able to access. Right now it’s automatic, it’s in the system. Google Maps is in the system. Apple’s going to replace that. Everybody thinks that Google’s not going to sit for this, and that they’ll come up with an app that reintroduces Google Maps to iPhones and iPads, but Apple has to approve that before they let it in the store. But with the Justice Department watching what they’re both doing, they probably will. You’re probably gonna have your pick of both, if you’re a big Google Maps fan. That would be my purely uneducated wild guess.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Snerdley is asking me what are some of the other big changes? One of them is a thing called Passbook, and this is useless for me. But it’s perhaps the future of mobile payments. Everybody is trying to corner that market. And they’re trying to do it with the near field communication chip. Now an NFC chip. If you have a key, your car key, the key’s in your pocket, if you can walk up to your locked car and open it, that’s a near field communication chip in your key that enables that.
Well, some phones have the NFC chip in it. And if you’re at a retailer that uses NFC then the phone can be used to pay the bill, restaurant bill or whatever. But it’s not been widely accepted yet at the point of sale at retail outlets. The iPhone’s not going to have NFC. Apple has a database of 400 million credit card payers in their iTunes store. They’re going to go at this a whole different way. This Passbook thing is not going to be a payment system when it starts. It’s to replace what you have in your pocket. Boarding passes. Bus passes. Amtrack passes. It will have bar codes on all those things that your phone will project and you’ll be able to use your phone as your boarding pass, because you’ll put it in there.
I don’t use any of this stuff. So it is of zilch, zero value to me. But for people who use this kind of stuff, it’s going to be a pretty big step forward. But it’s a ground level first step into a whole bunch of possibilities that Apple could end up controlling, which I’m sure they want to do. That’s a pretty big thing. There are others. I have to get the list in front of me, Snerdley, to go rat, tat, tat, tat right down the list for you. iOS 5 was major in some of the updates that happened. Plus there’s always, like Siri, we never knew until the iPhone came out last year that there was something like Siri. None of the betas had Siri. Nobody knew a thing about Siri until the week before the phone was introduced when Apple leaked it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: There’s a couple things about iOS 6 for Apple. They really are after Google. You know, Google makes most of its money from searches, with all the advertising that’s on all of those searches any number of ways. And Siri is being set up to replace Google. Right now, Siri doesn’t search. If you ask Siri a question that it doesn’t have the answer to, it will take you to Google search (or Bing if you want to set it up there). But Siri is going to do searches.
Even mundane stuff like, “What’s the score of the Yankees game?” Siri will tell you.
You need to open an app? Siri will open it for you.
They’re going to expand Siri. It’s much better at understanding what you say now, too, in terms of dictation, which I’ve always found fabulous, anyway. I really haven’t had a problem with Siri in that regard. But they’re going to really, really improve it. I mean, Facebook integration’s going to be part of the system. And that’s going to be a huge deal for the kids. They’ve already done it with Twitter.
Facebook is going to be part of it in the fall. They’re going to go much deeper with iCloud and the unification of the iPhone and iPad with your desktop computer. It’s amazing stuff. A lot of the headline stuff is stuff that I don’t use. So I’m kind of going, “Ho-hum.” Passbook is no big deal to me. Movie tickets? I don’t go to movies. I don’t get boarding passes. I don’t have Starbucks investments. I have none of that stuff. But for people that do, that’s going to be a vast organizational improvement for them.