Where past generations had film cameras, scrapbooks, notebooks, and that part of the brain which stores memories, we now have a smartphone app for every conceivable recording need. The thing is, all that time you spend logging and then curating the quotidian aspects of your daily life is time taken away from actually doing things.

There is just so much to unpack in Carter's dismissal, one hardly knows where to begin. There's the dig at current generations, who presumably lack the part of the brain that stores memories. There's the implicit certainty that curating one's life isn't actually doing anything, suggesting that in spending your time logging data you deprive yourself of some greater chance at capturing life's essence. And then there's the sweeping arrogance of the phrase "no matter how inconsequential."

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A simple story, maybe, but in that personal shift you can hear the echo of 2012's biggest technological transformation. Call it the year of the great untethering: In 2012 "mobile" triumphed. We've seen this paradigm shift rolling down the pike for a long time. Now it's here. The decline of the PC is no longer subject to debate.

And that's a big deal. The changing sales figures for desktops and laptops versus tablets and smartphones signify more than just an interesting tech business trend. This is a story about the reconfiguration of society around the small screen, a development that has implications for the media, entertainment, and advertising industries; for our privacy and our economy; for business and politics. If you're not figuring out how to play in what the tech industry likes to call the "smart connected device space" then you have already lost. And if you are not paying attention to what these devices will do to us as well as for us, then you are criminally negligent. Society is changing fast as we get more mobile. Can we keep up?

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I drove in a mild panic to the nearest Verizon Wireless store and met with a sales representative. After asking for my vitals, he typed for a few seconds and waited. Then he typed, then he waited. Then he sighed.

“You can get a new phone,” he said. “At retail price.”

“How much is that?” I asked.

“Four hundred fifty dollars.”

Could I get my current BlackBerry fixed? The rep shook his head sadly. “They don’t let us repair the phones in the store anymore,” he said.

I felt his pain. Having grown up tinkering with Radio Shack electronic kits, I used to love taking things apart—radios, tape players, anything I could get my hands on.

But in the last twenty-five years or so, the number of household devices we can easily tinker with has dwindled.

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Cook's pay for fiscal 2012, which ended in September, consisted of $1.4 million in salary, a bonus of $2.8 million, and $17,000 in company contributions to his 401(k) account and life insurance premiums, according to a filing.

Apple Inc.'s board saw no need to give Cook additional shares in 2012 after the sign-on grant of 1 million shares in 2011. Half of those shares vest in 2016 and the other half in 2021. A lot could happen to the value of the shares before Cook can cash them out, but the sign-on grant made him -at least on paper- the highest-paid U.S. CEO in 2011.

Cook did vest into shares worth $140 million in 2012. Those shares were granted earlier, when he was chief operating officer. He had been acting CEO for a while before the death of company co-founder Steve Jobs in October of 2011.

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As Apple stock continues it’s a long steep slide, investors and market watchers are speculating about whether the Cupertino, Calif.-based company can regain the mojo that made it a market favorite. But a report in today’s Financial Times (subscription required) suggests that the Android platform, now installed on three out of four smartphones sold worldwide, is exercising a gravitational pull on app developers.

Google’s Android has long lagged behind Apple in the number of available apps and the number of apps sold, but the balance appears to be shifting. “Android is the platform of growth,” Misha Lyalin, CEO of Zeptolab, which puts out the popular game “Cut the Rope” told the paper.

The article quotes one techie who personifies the platform rift:

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So why is the once-unstoppable favorite suddenly in such a fix?

Yes, Apple is up some 25 percent for the year. But it was only four months ago when the price per share sat at $700.

In the New York Times, economist Edward Zabitsky suggested that "as Samsung has surpassed Apple as the leading handset maker, apps have become more important than the devices that carry them, and handsets are increasingly being evaluated on their ability to access the cloud and interact with other devices." Zabitsky, long bearish on Apple, suggested those trends are bad news for Apple's long-term competitive situation.

In Business Insider, Henry Blodget posited several theories, many of them also suggesting concern that Apple's long dominance may be waning as the smart phone market evolves and lower-priced -- and lower-profit margin -- phones take a larger piece of the annual sales.

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"Aesthetically pleasing" is very subjective.

I was deep into the fifth page of the reader comments of the first installment of Ars Technica's excellent "The State of Smartphones in 2012," when I encountered this observation, which is simultaneously the most illuminating and worthless Internet comment of all time. It was a response to the declaration by Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham that the "Live Tiles" user interface in the brand-spanking-new Windows Phone 8 operating system was more "aesthetically striking" than the icons of Apple's iOS or the widgets of Google's Android.

(With Live Tiles, the restless smartphone user can expand or shrink the on-screen real estate devoted to a particular app or function, providing a level of configurability alien to the straitlaced universe that iPhone lovers, in particular, are accustomed to. Remember this, for future reference: Windows: freedom! Apple: tyranny!)

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In the second most embarrassing tech flub of the year, (Facebook's IPO) Apple's iPhone 5 included a new but comically flawed maps program. The release resulted in the firing of an executive and a rare public setback for the company. In cartography, it turns out, experience matters and now Google has released a new maps app for sometimes rival Apple's flagship phone. In a near worshipful review, New York Times gadget fiend David Pogue finds that Google's maps app is accurate:

Hundreds of Google employees have spent years hand-editing the maps, fixing the thousands of errors that people report every day. (In the new app, you report a mistake just by shaking the phone.) And since 2006, Google’s Street View vehicles have trawled 3,000 cities, photographing and confirming the cartographical accuracy of five million miles of roads.

Now iPhone users won't be bumping into each other because they're lost, they'll be bumping into each other because they're staring at the maps app on their iPhones.

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Here's how it begins:

With the "fiscal cliff" looming, taxpayers are wringing their hands about all sorts of things. Income taxes might rise, dividends might get walloped, lifetime gift-tax exemptions might get slashed.

But when it comes to immediate impact on their wallets, maybe they should be thinking about something else entirely: The Apple tax.

Americans are shelling out big bucks annually to outfit the entire household with Apple products.

But about halfway down the column, Taylor notes, "Remember, this is not something that consumers are being forced to pay. They are dipping willingly into their own pockets, because they're essentially slaves to the devices."

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Of the Google Play and Apple Store apps reviewed, only 20 percent disclosed any information about the app’s privacy practices, while almost 60 percent of the apps were found to be transmitting information from a user's device to third parties, such as the app developers, advertising networks or analytics companies. Fourteen apps out of hundreds surveyed were also found to transmit the location of the device and the phone number, the FTC found.

The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act requires online service operators for children under 13 to get consent from parents before collecting and sharing personal information. Based on its findings, the FTC announced Monday investigations to determine if certain mobile apps developers have violated COPPA.

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz commented in a written statement:

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Apple began selling the iPhone 5 on Sept. 21, the same day the company's stock hit an all-time peak of $705.07 per share. Since then, the stock has plunged nearly 25 percent, trimming the company's market value by more than $150 billion. On Friday, the stock fell almost 3 percent and closed at $533.25.

The sell-off has had broad impact. It has reached beyond Apple's own stockholders because the company is the largest component in the Standard & Poor's 500 and Nasdaq composite index - two benchmarks that are tracked by widely held mutual funds and exchange traded funds, or ETFs.

Apple comprises 4 percent of the S&P 500 and nearly 12 percent of the Nasdaq, according to FactSet. The Nasdaq has shed 6 percent since Apple's stock price peaked while the S&P 500 has declined 3 percent, the same as the Dow Jones industrial average, which doesn't include Apple in its basket of 30 stocks.

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The timing was perfect for a growing cohort of economy-watchers eager to make the argument that globalization's malign impact on the American worker has hit high tide and is finally beginning to ebb. Just a week ago, the Atlantic presciently published "The Insourcing Boom," a fascinating in-depth story by Charles Fishman investigating General Electric's decision to start up new appliance assembly lines in the U.S. And "GE is not alone," writes Fishman,  arguing that an increasing number of American corporations are discovering it makes economic sense to bring the factories back home. Apple's news was the exclamation point at the end of the Atlantic's sentence.

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Last year, President Obama candidly asked Steve Jobs about the outsourcing of almost all Apple manufacturing jobs overseas.“Those jobs aren’t coming back,” Jobs reportedly told the president. But, according to Cook's announcement, Apple has not abandoned American manufacturing.

"We’ve been working for years on doing more and more in the United States,” the CEO told NBC's Brian Williams. Cook told Businessweek that Apple -- the biggest company in the world by market value -- had a responsibility to create U.S. jobs. He did, however, note that the U.S. education system is failing to produce enough people with the skills needed for modern manufacturing processes.

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The push, noted CNET, appears to be underpinned by the fact that Android controls a far larger percentage of the smartphone market than Apple:

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The increasing importance of internet retail appears to be coming at the expense of traditional brick and mortar stores which saw Black Friday sales drop slightly, to $11.2 billion.

The online shopping surge arrived even before tomorrow’s “cyber Monday” event when consumers can supposedly access numerous online bargains. However, the decision by online retail behemoth Amazon to offer comparable bargains throughout last week may cut into cyber Monday grosses and relevance.

In recent years, Black Friday sales have created near riots and even fatalities as shoppers crushed into big box stores. This year the frenzy was relatively subdued though there was a hectic scene outside a Victoria’s Secret in Kansas City, Mo.

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Sorkin also revealed the last time he spoke with the late technologist, Jobs wanted Sorkin to write a Pixar movie. "I didn't think I'd be able to make an inanimate object talk," Sorkin said. Jobs responded, "Once you make them talk, they won't be inanimate anymore."

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Some pundits predict that, with an ongoing power blackout south of midtown, uncleared floodwaters elsewhere and half of subway lines still suspended, the normally extensive lines that attend Apple product launches will be greatly decreased for Friday's launch. The post-hurricane may thus serve as a referendum on people's desire (or desperation) for the product -- essentially a shrunken iPad, which is more expensive than its tablet competitors.

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On Tuesday, the company revealed the iPad Mini, with a screen that's about two-thirds the size of the full-size model, and said it will cost $329 and up.

Apple starts taking orders for the new model on Friday, Oct. 26, said marketing chief Phil Schiller at an event in San Jose, Calif. Wi-Fi-only models on Nov. 2. Later, the company will add models capable of accessing "LTE" wireless data networks.

The price fits into the Apple product lineup between the iPad 2 at $399 and the latest version of the iPod touch at $299. But company watchers had been expecting Apple to price the iPad Mini at $250 to $300 to counter the threat of less expensive tablets like Amazon's Kindle Fire, which starts at $159.

Apple shares fell $14.83, or 2.3 percent, to $619.20 when the price was announced. Shares of Amazon.com Inc. were down 12 cents, or less than 0.1 percent, at $233.66 while the rest of the stock market was in retreat.

The iPad mini weighs 0.68 pounds, half as much as the full-size iPad, and is as thin as a pencil, Schiller said.

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