Boutin’s latest on the product that won’t exist because he says so starts off like a mea culpa:

A month ago, I said Steve Jobs had no plans to unveil an iTV—the hypothetical iTunes video gadget for big-screen TVs. Wrong! This week His Steveness invited me to the iTV demo at Apple’s Tuesday press event in San Francisco.

It’s interesting that “His Steveness” (a nickname so clever it had already been used in German two years ago) would bother to invite the writer of Why you don’t have an Apple iTV to the iTV unveiling.

It makes me think there might be something to my crackpot theory that the temporary name “iTV,” and perhaps even its early announcement, are a jab at Paul’s uninformed article. (Yeah, that would be unreasonable and stupid, but we are talking about “His Steveness.” He does shit like that.) On the other hand, that “me” might be an ego-inflating abbreviation of “Engadget for whom I transcribe,” but that’s more boring for everyone.

Boutin wastes little time apologizing and gets right to criticizing the newly announced product. Gone is his hand-wringing over the “10-foot interface,” which the iTV addresses neatly with its Apple remote and Front Row interface (first shown almost a year ago, and included with most new Macs). Now it’s all about how the iTV won’t be a TiVo.

I’m a little surprised about the lack of a coax-in too, but it’s not inspiring me to write a piece condemning the unfinished product to failure. The problem with cable is that cable companies are greedy bitches. They’re in the middle of tearing apart TiVo by incorporating TiVo’s original ideas into their own boxes, which are the only ones that can decrypt premium content digital signals. (This is probably why the new EyeTV Hybrid doesn’t even bother with digital cable.)

Apple could either beg cable companies to cooperate (have you ever seen Apple beg?), tell people to use broadcast (that would only work on techno-hippies like me), or flank the cable companies by delivering content over the Internet. So they took plan C, as they did with music. If you think about it, it’s not really that surprising.

Boutin goes after the present quality of iTunes video downloads, which is inferior to HDTV (and even DVD, if the DVD is well mastered). This is true, but…

Séan Captain recently explained in Slate, by the time the video quality of downloads catches up to HDTV, there’ll already be a higher-definition replacement for it.

..that isn’t. (Do all of these jokers have French-looking names?) What Sayan really said:

And don’t just assume that the Web will catch up in a year or two. While Internet bandwidth and video quality will improve, so will our standards. There’s already talk of increasing the color gamut and resolution of HDTV. Television quality is a moving target that the Internet already fails to hit.

They’re both wrong, but at least Sayan says “don’t assume B” and dodges assuming A. From everyone who was paying attention’s perspective, it took forever to get HDTV in the U.S. It was in Japan in, like, the 60s or something. Calling television a “moving target” that the Internet can’t keep up with is just hilariously ignorant. The Internet is famous for making laps around technologies controlled by governments or slow-moving corporations—TV has both of those weighing it down.

Furthermore, Boutin’s wildly overreaching summary is wrong in the present. Apple has been offering HD-quality “downloads” of movie trailers since the April 2005 introduction of QuickTime 7. Surpassing HDTV is just a matter of adjusting compression settings, and delivering it in quantity is just a matter of bandwidth. Ever hear of FiOS? (Really, he should have run this piece by those “tech-savvy friends” at Engadget.)

If the cable companies have any sense, they’re pissing their pants right now. Soon they’ll be in the same position as record stores, watching Apple sucking away the business in a way they hadn’t imagined. Software moves faster than hardware. The Internet is faster than the sleeping cable guy. And Apple is good at exploiting these advantages.

Boutin is, apparently, good at being assigned pieces he is wholly unqualified to write. He’s become a CNET-style uninformed Apple skeptic. If he were writing for them, we wouldn’t have to be bothered with his existence. But what the hell is Slate thinking? Their Technology column has never been good, and now it’s descending into incoherent, offensively clueless jabs.

The headline was “Will Apple Change Television Forever? Not now. Maybe never.” This beautiful disaster accidentally comes close to the truth. “Not now” (it’s unreleased) and “maybe never” (yes, you never know) are throwaway, but the part about changing television is dead on. Shifting to a download-at-will vs. broadcast model would “change television forever.” Just copying TiVo would not “change television forever,” as TiVo started in 1997 and you can’t “change television forever” in the same way twice.

Great insight Slate, it’s just exactly backwards.

Elsewhere:

• Why Apple is announcing it early
• Why it won’t be finished until 2007