We can make those ads so bad, in fact, that the experience of using the device would be effectively ruined.

But see, that's the point. We don't expect anyone will choose the ads. Because, for a very reasonable monthly fee, you'll be able to eliminate all those ads and get your content free of all interruptions. How reasonable, you say? Well, let's say that for you could watch all the TV you wanted. Let's say that we can get all the TV networks, or most of them anyway, on board for this. Let's say that we give you not just this week's shows but an enormous archive, one that ultimately includes every TV show ever made. Tear out the cable box, stop paying those a******s $100 or $200 a month, and go with us instead.

Thus Apple now becomes the cable company. And the cable company dies. Yes, friends, another enormous, ridiculous, old-fashioned, greedy, fat, slow-moving, change-averse, stupid industry falls before the power of Steve.

The real Steve Jobs would never cop to a strategy so crass. But Fake Steve's idea that Apple simply wants to control the horizontal and the vertical of your video and phone life -- the -- makes a lot of sense.

Like most large high-tech companies, that may or may not find their way into products. Over the past three years, the Cupertino crew has sought to patent that communicate with iPods and iPhones (and only iPods and iPhones); gadgets that would prevent portable devices from recharging if they've been synced with a nonauthorized machine; and gizmos that would sit inside Apple devices and record "customer abuse events" that void the product's warranty. (And then there are those .) We haven't seen any of those things appear in Apple products... yet.