On Monday, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster reported on Mac and iPod sales and noted that Apple’s iPod sales have slipped 23% in the last quarter and represent only 2% of Apple’s revenue. This means the iPod is no longer what consumers want, and that it may not necessarily be around for many more years. It is no wonder that Apple never bothered to update the iPod Classic line after they added the larger 160 GB model storage option.

There are other cloud storage and synching services: Apple’s own iCloud, Box, iDolly, Google Cloud, Microsoft SkyDrive, and more. However, while they all have their virtues, none of them matches Dropbox for no hassle, transparent, “just works” functionality in the context of keeping work in progress—along with recently archived files—on several work platform laptops and my iPad harmoniously synchronized.

With Apple’s stock in an unstable state and the press questioning its innovation, other competitors such as Samsung have taken the lead. Apple is rumored to be working on a new iPhone 5S as well as an iPhone 6, which is exactly what the company needs in order to retake some of the market share that they have lost. Tim Cook has been under fire in recent months, mainly because customers are becoming aware that Apple’s current product lineup is made up of mostly refreshes of older devices.

Newt Gingrich is puzzled about what to call the device in his hand. Personally, I’d call it an iPhone in a Mophie case. But what starts out as a video of a politician and author apparently confused by modern technology turns into a cogent and thoughtful call to a conversation about how technology can change our lives.

Microsoft’s Clint Patterson frames the recent software subscription model only as either “progressive,” or “premature,” asking consumers to weigh in with their opinions on the matter. For what it’s worth, my personal answer is “neither,” and I propose a third response: “Bad idea for consumers whose time will never come,” at least in my estimation.

Mr. Gates is right that an awful lot of production and content creation oriented iPad users are frustrated with the iPad’s limitations and angularities—the lameness of its select/cut/paste/copy editing functions, the lack of a user accessible file system and multitasking worthy of the name (ie: with side-by-side page views), no partial screen screenshots, no standard USB port and so forth. However…

Adobe Creative Cloud membership will be US$49.99 per month. Sorry, but I won’t be signing up. I don’t rent software, at least not if I can help it. Pixelmator sells on the App Store for 20 bucks. If you need more power than that, the GIMP is free, and you can put up with a lot of learning curve climbing to save fifty bucks a month in rental fees. Forever. Or, at least I can.

With so little news from Apple since the launch of the iPad Mini, everybody from fanboys to Wall Street are a bit nervous that Cupertino’s mojo has evaporated. I think we’re in a transitional period, and if you look at Apple’s long term future there’s little cause for alarm. In that future, the continued evolution of the iPad is what will drive growth, meaning the slowdown in iPhone growth and feature expansion is nothing to worry about.

Apple should enter the car space, buy Tesla, and make Elon Musk the CEO. People love cars, and an Apple iCar would be beautiful, connected, and intelligent, and it would do all the little things that delight you and make you fall in love with your car.

No North American jurisdiction bans hands-free cellphone use, including voice-to-text technology such as Siri voice texting, even though research has consistently shown that in terms of causing driver distraction, hands-free technology is no better than handheld. And while texting drivers may believe they’re being more responsible and careful when they use the voice-to-text method, new research findings reconfirm that those applications offer no real safety advantage over manual texting.