This is the way that rumors get started-- and, of course, we're pretty darn excited about the whole prospect. Longtime viewers will recognize the "Apple is about to be bought out by X" plot device to be a staple of our little soap opera; whether it's the classic Disney-Apple merger, or fervent whispers about a purchase by Sun or Oracle, or even the most recent "Sony takeover" variation, nothing spells Apple like a nice, juicy buyout story. So imagine our glee when faithful viewer Kent Love pointed us squarely at an article over at MSNBC about how AOL should consider laying out a few billion for One Infinite Loop and everything contained therein.

According to the author, the reasons for such a purchase are plentiful: with a market cap of under $7 billion, Apple is "cheap" (hey!) to a media conglomerate now worth about seventeen times that amount; Apple has QuickTime, which is a natural match for AOL's massive online user base and its newly-acquired arsenal of Time Warner music and video content; and Apple makes the iMac, a consumer device that excels at simple Internet access and digital media delivery, and which could represent just the "media center" system AOL needs to send Microsoft running for cover. From our perspective, we only need one reason to consider this a nifty scenario: it's dripping with even more drama than the pilot for Fox's upcoming "Who Wants To Marry The Paradise Island Survivor's Million Most Explosive Home Police Videos?"

Think about it for a second. As soon as your brain processed the basic concept of AOL owning and controlling Apple, didn't your body trigger the same kind of primal fear response that you might expect if you'd just been dipped in Open Pit barbecue sauce and tossed in front of three starving tigers? You've seen what Netscape has been cranking out since it got swallowed by Case's Beast; just imagine what AOL would do to Apple's products. Do we really want our Macs' startup chimes replaced by the sound of that guy saying "Welcome! You've got an iMac!"? Scary stuff, indeed-- which is, of course, great for the ratings. So as long as it never really comes to pass, we say bring on the buyout rumors and keep 'em coming.

There's just one problem, of course, which is that the article takes pains to clarify that it is not reporting that AOL and Apple are actually considering any such deal-- the piece is simply an examination of why such a merger might be in AOL's best interests. It even goes so far as to state that a deal like that could never happen, at least not under the Second Jobs Dynasty. So what we're counting on is the infinitesimally short attention span of the average 'net surfer to miss all that, and instead glom onto nothing but the "AOL buying Apple" factoid, which will then be disseminated across the webscape like an unstoppable mutant virus. Hey, we can dream, can't we?