RUSH: I have a lot of e-mail from people asking me what I think of the new iPhone, and I’m purposely not telling you ’cause I know it would make you mad. You don’t want to hear about the iPhone and you don’t want to hear about football and you don’t want to hear about the replacement refs. I know. You’re the Stick-to-the-Issues Crowd. Well, let me tell you: This iPhone… I’ll be honest with you. When I first saw what it was gonna be, I was disappointed.
I was expecting a major revision in form factor since they’d had two years to work on it. You know, a larger screen (just longer by a half an inch) was no big deal to me. LTE? I’ve been using an LTE hotspot for a year and a half with Wi-Fi, so the fact the phone was gonna have it built in? Eh, no big deal. There was no Siri-like feature announced for the phone this year. I saw the iOS 6, the new software, the system. I saw it a month ago.
I said, “No great shakes in this. This is obviously more a system upgraded where Apple’s gonna separate itself from Google.” But I got the phone anyway ’cause, as you know, I’m on the cutting edge. I’ll tell you, there’s nothing like that. It is a precision work of art instrument. It’s got a processor in it that’s twice as fast as the iPad. I’m talking about processing power, not Internet speed, which is lightning fast anyway.
It’s twice as fast as any hand-held computer of any type out there. It is amazing. And you don’t even feel it in your pocket. It’s that light. It’s that thin. This maps business? The CEO of Apple apologized today. He sent out a letter, an open letter to everybody apologizing for the maps fiasco. It’s not that bad. Now, it is bad internationally, but it’s not that bad. I’ve played with it. I’ve clicked on Siri and said, “Take me to such-and-such a restaurant,” and it did it.
It gave me the address, showed me the directions turn by turn, and it was there. I haven’t any problems with the maps. But it is bad in certain parts of the country. What’s interesting to me is they knew it was that bad, and they released it — and that, they’ve never done. Now, I understand that they had to make the break with Google at some point. I understand that. They could have told everybody, “Look, it’s a beta. It has a long way to go.”
They didn’t. They did the exact opposite. That’s only thing I don’t understand about this. The iPhone’s cool. I thought it was not gonna be any big deal, and… (interruption) What’s that? The 4S now, when I go back to it, the previous one, it feels like a rock. It’s that heavy, and that much bigger, and it seems old. It’s a good phone. It just seems slower. I’d be disappointed if I had to go back to the 4S. I would.