14 DAY TRIAL // When she’s not charging people to give them romantic guidance, famous astrologer Susan Miller likes to dispense valuable advice regarding techy acquisitions.
In an interview with TIME magazine, she blames the planet Mercury for the bad press surrounding the iPhone 6. She firmly upholds that this is not a good time to buy any gadget, because Mercury's strange orbital movements as seen from Earth will cause it to have bugs.
An “expert’s” opinion
“I’m such an Apple addict, I love everything they come out with, but it’s not the right time,” Miller, founder of Astrology Zone, tells TIME. “I know that everybody wants to buy the iPhone 6, but you’ve got to wait.”
“It’s not a good time to buy an electronic item,” Miller says, explaining that Mercury is in retrograde between October 4 and 25.
“Sometimes you can make the wrong decision or you buy something and you never use it and you say to yourself, ‘Gosh, that was a bad purchase.’ You bought the wrong model or then it goes on sale the following week, or something happens… [iPhones are] going to continue to have little software bugs.”
What’s retrograde, you ask? It’s when the planet Mercury appears to slow down from its normal trajectory in the sky and then starts to move backward. This happens over days, and it's basically just an optical illusion caused by the planet’s elliptical orbit and the discrepancies in orbital movements between Mercury and the Earth (our vantage point). Any reader who feels like expanding on this can do so in the comments.
Tell Apple to delay your order
It isn’t clear if Mercury’s seemingly odd behavior is affecting the iPhone 6 production lines in China or Apple’s development of iOS 8 in Cupertino, California.
Miller only says that any order scheduled to arrive between October 4 and 25 should be delayed. Which would suggest that the celestial event is also capable of jinxing a monetary transaction. She has a solution for this.
“You can even call [Apple] up and say, ‘You know what, I’m not going to be here. I don’t want anybody to take it from my building, so could you deliver this in November?' And they will. They’ll even be happy to hear from you because they think that they’re running short.”
Dishing out further “proof” that no one should buy gadgets as long as Mercury is in retrograde, Miller says her daughter “once bought a laptop during Mercury retrograde and had to sell it on eBay after realizing she hadn’t bought enough hard drive space,” according to the report.