RUSH: Here’s Elliott, Miami, Florida. Elliott, thank you for waiting. I appreciate you. You’re on the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Hey Rush, how you doing? First of all, the debt that we will never be able to pay is the debt that this country owes you.
RUSH: Thank you. That’s probably true, but thank you very much.
CALLER: Listen, I’ve got a little dilemma here. I’ve got a 14-year-old that for two years has been asking me for a Mac. I’ve been skirting the situation back and forth, and the other day she tells me, ‘Well, Rush has ’em, and he always has the best stuff.’ So I’m gonna have to end up getting one of these damn things. So what do you recommend?
RUSH: This is for your 14-year-old daughter?
CALLER: Daughter, yes.
RUSH: She is blackmailing you.
CALLER: Yes, sir.
RUSH: She’s using me to say that what she wants is the best, she wants a Mac?
CALLER: Yes. You got it. And, you know what? I can’t deny her because she’s right. I’ve been listening to you since Dan’s Bake Sale.
RUSH: All right.
CALLER: And I can’t deny her so I said, ‘Well, let me call him.’
RUSH: Wait a minute. Dan’s Bake Sale was in 1993.
CALLER: I’ve been listening to you since then.
RUSH: Wow. She’s a genuine Rush Baby.
CALLER: Well, no, I’ve been listening to you since then. She says that she’s following in your footsteps.
RUSH: Okay. Okay. All right, that makes more sense. Now, does she have a computer now?
CALLER: Oh, yeah. She’s got a Dell but she’s saying that’s not any good because Rush doesn’t own one, and I’m like —
RUSH: Is it a laptop?
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: So she wants another laptop?
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: Correct. Okay, well, there are three different lines. There’s the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. There’s a third, the MacBook Air. That’s Wi-Fi only, very thin. Can you hold? I got some more questions for you. Can you hang on through the break?
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: Yeah. I mean you won’t go wrong whichever laptop you get, but you could get more than she needs if you’re not careful, which I would do, of course.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Back to Elliott in Miami. Okay, Elliott, your daughter is 14. Does she take care of the computer she has now?
CALLER: Yeah, of course. If not, she wouldn’t keep it.
RUSH: Okay. Well, don’t misunderstand, now, I mean if it gets banged around, if she takes it to school and back and so forth. I just need to know before I make a recommendation to you, so she does take care of it, treats it well?
CALLER: Yes, sir.
RUSH: Okay. Here are the three possibilities. There is the MacBook, which is white, and I think it’s got an 11- or 13-inch screen. Then there’s the MacBook Air, which is sleek looking, it’s the thinnest. It primarily uses Wi-Fi although you can get an adapter, connect it, wired Ethernet, but it’s primarily a Wi-Fi machine. It’s sleek looking, very, very thin, beautiful display. I think it’s probably, I’m guessing in the 13-inch range. And then there are the MacBook Pros and they come in 15 and 17 inches, and they have LED backlit screens and they’re the top of the line. Now, I don’t know the prices of these things off the top of my head.
CALLER: She’s already printed out a couple of these for me and I told her that it would have to be the lower end, and then she also told me, ‘Well, if you get the lower end, we should get an iPad or an iPod,’ and I said, ‘Listen, you’re pressing your luck here.’
RUSH: Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, wait a minute. I’m gonna give you an iPad to give her.
CALLER: No, you’re kidding? No, no, Rush —
RUSH: I have some personally engraved EIB iPads. I got a bunch of them to give away at random like this on the air. They’re engraved with my signature and the EIB logo on the back and they’re top line, they’re 64 gigabyte with 3G.
CALLER: Rush, you’re kidding me.
RUSH: So when you get off the phone here you need to give your shipping address to Snerdley, and we’ll ship it down there with a ZooGue case that also has my name and EIB logo emblazoned on the case. This case allows her to set the iPad up at any angle she wants to use it. Now, if that’s all you think she needs then your problem is solved.
CALLER: No, no. Listen, now, remember, we were kids, and she’s posturing here. This is her posturing for — you know, like remember when we were kids, if you needed $30 bucks, you asked for $40?
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Sort of like the federal government —
RUSH: Yeah, I remember.
CALLER: — with their tax revenue loss, which was —
RUSH: When I turned 16 I started putting pictures of Ford mustangs under the glass on my dad’s desk, and I had to buy my own first car two years later. But, yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about. Look, the iPad won’t be enough because you can’t load word processing software onto it, if she uses Windows for Office on her Mac, any additional software. The iPad is great, portability for Web browsing, Facebook, e-mail and that kind of thing, but if she does serious software work on it she needs something supplemental. I’ll tell you what I would do. I were you, I’d get either the MacBook Air or the small MacBook Pro, which I don’t know if it comes in 13. The smallest Pro is a 15-inch. That may be a little more than you want to go, but remember, now, these things can be configured with different size hard drives and RAM memory, the price is gonna change in each one no matter how you put it together. Plus Apple has education discounts. You can save up to 200 bucks a computer by applying for it. The Apple website has a link there where you can check that out.
CALLER: Oh, great ’cause my wife teaches. That would be great.
RUSH: Oh. Cool.
CALLER: Rush, let me tell you, you’re too good, man.
RUSH: Here are the recommendations, MacBook or the MacBook Air, one of these two. She would love the MacBook Air. I mean it looks sleek. It’s the thinnest laptop you’ve ever seen. Beautiful display, it’s not too big, it’s very, very light, and she’d love it.
CALLER: Sir, I don’t know what to say.
RUSH: You don’t have to say anything. It’s Christmastime. This is the fun of all of this. So you hang on, and Snerdley will get your address, and we’ll FedEx this iPad, you’ll have it tomorrow.
CALLER: Thank you very much. God bless you.
RUSH: Elliott, we’re happy to do it here at the EIB Network. You didn’t ask for a job, so that’s —
CALLER: You know what, sir? You know what I really would like?
RUSH: What?
CALLER: For this government to get out of our way and let us go on our own.
RUSH: Well, we’re working on that, too.
CALLER: You know? Get out of our way.
RUSH: We are working on that, too. By the way, all of these Macs are gonna start around 900 bucks, and depending on how you outfit it you can take the MacBook Pro up to 3,000 bucks. You don’t want to go that much.
CALLER: No.
RUSH: The MacBook Air, you can’t get it up to that kind of price. The MacBook is white. The Mac Pro looks aluminum, silver, it’s very sleek. Just go to the website, go to Apple.com and just click on Mac and you can see pictures of all these.
CALLER: Rush, I owe you.
RUSH: All right. Thanks very much, Elliott. Take care, and don’t hang up. Snerdley will be talking to you in mere moments.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Hey, Elliott in Miami, two corrections, two things you should know: MacBook Air does not have a DVD slot or an optical drive. You have to get an external DVD drive if she wants to watch a movie or insert a class lesson or something. That will be an extra charge. The thing’s so thin it doesn’t have it in it, and they do make a 13-inch MacBook Pro in addition to 15 and 17. So those are the two things I wanted to make sure that I corrected. Go to the website Apple.com or go to a Mac store. Go to an Apple store. They’ve got all these things that you can see, play with, and figure out which one would be best.