As usual, this will be a long and complicated story.

So when cable TV subscriber lists soared, there were many areas in the U.S. that were all or mostly unserved. That’s because, in sparsely-populated rural locations, it didn’t make sense for a company to lay wire, or if they did, it would cost the customer an unseemly amount of money.

Forget about a TV antenna. Cable TV was actually created to provide a central connection point to provide TV service in areas too distant from the transmission tower to get decent reception by a regular antenna — or any reception.

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Apple critics have plenty of ammunition to post attacks, but not because of anything the company has done, or any of its possible failures. It’s in large part very much about the novel coronavirus and its impact on supply chains and sales. Most Apple Stores remain closed, and anyone who actually needs to get their gear fixed, and requires fast turnaround, is going to have a whale of a time getting it done.

That’s true with any tech gadget, but Apple tends to get the lion’s share of attention even if it really isn’t doing anything different from the competition, or even if it’s doing something better.

So if you want a ride into an alternate universe, let’s climb aboard and get going.

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When the first iPad debuted in 2010, its reasons for existence were not altogether clear. In large part, it seemed little more than a giant iPod, with the added capability of being able to access cellular data, as an option. It used iOS, and worked with mostly scaled up version of iPhone apps.

Over time, developers learned to take advantage of the larger displays, but it took a while for apps to truly exploit the product differences, and it’s been a long decade.

At first, the iPad was largely regarded as a media consumption device, designed to watch videos from Netflix and YouTube. Despite a growing number of productivity apps, they were largely limited-function subsets of equivalent desktop PC apps.

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In the days when Steve Jobs ruled the roost at Apple, a Macworld Expo keynote was a very special event. Even though his patter seemed nearly off the cuff, you just know it was all carefully rehearsed. That’s just elegance of his delivery, to make everything seem as if he were saying it all for the first time.

In that, he was the consummate actor.

But where Jobs truly excelled was to make you believe that the product or service he introduced was something really special, something that had never, ever been done before. It didn’t matter if it was little more than a minor refresh of the previous year’s model.

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