When Michael Dell, in one of the major bone-headed statements of the last century, suggested that Apple should close down and return all the money to their investors, he was only echoing the conventional wisdom of the time. Apple was in trouble, losing sales and hemorrhaging cash, so it couldn’t possibly be saved.

History shows that, when the dark times are here, it’s sometimes possible to come back from a near-death experience, persevere and profit. Steve Jobs is justly credited with saving Apple, and part of that skill meant hiring the right people to keep the company going and fulfilling his visions. That’s expected to continue even if his sick leave proves permanent. Current speculation has it that COO Tim Cook will rise to CEO, and rely on a talented staff of senior executives to continue to conceive insanely great products.

At the same time, recent articles have offered brief profiles of prospective Apple CEOs, rating their prospects of taking the top job. But the truth is more mundane: Apple’s board reportedly has a succession plan in place, the appropriate executives already know their place in the “New Order,” but the fine details are being kept secret for competitive reasons. But if Jobs leaves, for whatever reason, and I’d rather hear that it’s the result of his desire to retire and enjoy his life with his family and friends rather than something more severe, the transfer of power will be fast and smooth.

Now one of the crazier stories in recent weeks raised the possibility of Apple being a potential acquisition target. The potential raw numbers were calculated, but, with a market valuation in excess of $300 billion, it’s hard to think what company has deep enough pockets to even make an offer. More to the point, Apple is still growing rapidly, so there’s no incentive to sell, and no possible benefit.

During the years when Apple was in difficult shape, the CEOs of the time did try to sell off Apple, but the deals were never consummated. The tech world is the better for their failure to dispose of Apple. In the normal course of events, such a merger would have retained the Apple logo, but today’s Macs, if they still existed, would probably be running Windows. Very few corporate mergers are done for those alleged synergies in goals and execution. They’re done to remove a competitor. The exceptions are when a small company is acquired by a larger one strictly for its technology, the sort of acquisition that both Google and Apple do from time to time.

But a story about someone acquiring Apple, and perhaps only Exxon would be able to raise enough capital, can sell newspapers and get hits, so it doesn’t matter if the possibility is little to none. Sure, if Apple hit bad times, with years and years of flagging sales and falling profits, perhaps under new leadership, an acquisition might make sense. But not now, and not for the foreseeable future.

The other stories amount to having Apple ape the product strategy of a competitor in order to advance sales and growth. One columnist, unnamed to avoid embarrassment, once suggested that Apple replace the Mac OS with the Windows kernel, and affix a Mac shell upon it. Fat chance!

The other lame suggestions usually revolve around products, features, or strategy that Apple must adopt post-haste in order to survive the creeping competition from — you fill in the blanks. Once it was the growing lineup of iPod killers. Now we have iPhone and iPad killers in abundance, and Apple needs to open their walled garden in order to survive. Isn’t that what allowed Microsoft to become king of the PC hill?

No, I’m not going to go into the fine and dirty historic details of how Microsoft came to dominate the PC industry, and licensing MS-DOS, and later Windows, to anyone who paid the price, was only a part of it.

Let’s not forget how Microsoft’s “open” PlaysForSure digital media player initiative failed. Microsoft created its own walled garden with the Zune, and that failed too. So it’s not necessarily the open versus closed question, but providing the best possible user experience to the customer. As Tim Cook recently suggested, regular people don’t want to become system integrators. They just want their gadgets to work.

This is where the Android OS, despite rapid growth by flooding the market with cheap gear of many models across many carriers, suffers seriously. When you buy a smartphone with the Android OS, and you may not know what it’s running until you see the fine print, or recognize the interface or features, there’s no assurance that you’ll be able to download major software upgrades. Not now, maybe not in the future, and that depends on the whims of carriers and manufacturers. You can’t even be sure that you’ll have the same OS skin, search engine, or standard bundled software. Verizon Wireless, for example, replaces Google with Bing as the standard search engine on many of their Android smartphones, and installs loads of crapware — extra apps you didn’t expect or want — which you can’t remove unless you hack your phone with a vanilla version of the OS. If that’s openness, do you really want it?

And don’t forget the companies who offer tablets equipped with versions of Android that aren’t even certified for use in anything but smartphones.

None of this means that another company can’t beat Apple. Maybe they’ll even learn how if they take a closer examination of Apple’s strategy. Fortunately for Apple, most of the competition sees but cannot hear.

I haven’t considered this, but how many Web sites are devoted to rumors about Dell products? What about HP? Although both companies rule the PC roost, it’s not as if people are clamoring for tidbits of information as to their next tech gadgets. That’s because these companies rely mostly on commodity products (generic PCs, servers, and printers), and thus seldom do anything to advance the state of the art in the tech industry.

This isn’t to say that the equipment built by Dell, HP, and similar companies, is necessarily bad. HP, for example, seems to provide good quality, and decent customer support. When it comes to the needs of their regular customers, that’s probably sufficient. Indeed, I’ve owned HP printers over the years, and found them to be well-built and quite reliable.

Then again, has there really been that much innovation in printer technology? Most of the products you buy seem to be nothing but variations on the very same theme. Yes, new ink jet printers may have more features at the same price, and put more tiny dots on the page to provide somewhat better print quality. But you still pay an arm and a leg for the consumables, which is where the profits are really made.

When it comes to Apple’s gear, they aren’t afraid to upset the business by killing products, and moving into new directions. Don’t forget how the iPod nano has undergone vast changes in form factor and feature sets, something almost no other tech company would dare with a successful product.

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That the iPhone is a major success, with Apple barely able to keep up with the increasing demand, certainly demonstrates that the competition doesn’t offer a whole lot of credibility. Sure, there may be more Android OS smartphones sold in the U.S., but that number includes loads of models from several different companies, some at two-for-one fire sales. What’s more, that situation precedes the arrival of the iPhone on the Verizon Wireless network, with new talk that it may also be available from T-Mobile shortly. Well, that would also mean T-Mobile’s “4G” ads, which attack the iPhone, will have to be ended I suppose.

You also know that, even as we speak, Apple is in the end stages of developing the iPhone 4’s successor, but whether that will be a substantially redesigned iPhone 5, or something more subtle (regardless of the name), is anyone’s guess. I’m more interested for now in certain software (and perhaps hardware) issues that I’d like to see fixed some day.

Take the proximity sensor, which deactivates the display and touchscreen when the device is brought near your face during a call. Yes, I realize Apple had some issues with this function in the first release of iOS 4, which impacted the iPhone 4. But when I put the device in my pocket, more often than not, when I take it out again, something on the screen has been selected, and it’s about to perform some function, such as sending a message to an address that consist of gibberish.

Shouldn’t the proximity sensor figure out that the unit has been placed in some sort of enclosure that covers the display (other than your face), and thus touchscreen functionality must be switched off? But it never seems to work that way, not with this iPhone, not with the previous models.

As far as Mail for the iOS, it’s just too lightweight compared to the Mac OS X version.

I’d like, for example, to be able to select a separate signature for different accounts. That doesn’t seem to be a resource-hogging function. But you have just one choice that’s configured as a preference, and, yes, I did remove the “sent from my iPhone” label. Apple doesn’t need free advertising from me. But I also remove the custom bumper frames bearing a car dealer’s name when I take home a new auto. They don’t need the free advertising either.

It would also be nice if Mail could use the same rules I set with the desktop version. Usually those rules funnel certain messages, from a specific sender, or with a certain entry in the subject line, to a different folder. This shouldn’t be so big a deal either.

Apple ought to also demonstrate some concern for the bane of an email user’s existence, spam. Yes, I realize ISPs, and dedicated email services (even your basic $4 Web hosting package) offer some level of spam protection. Sometimes it’s pretty good; often it’s pathetic, as your Inbox remains flooded with that junk. But wouldn’t it be nice to offer the same level of junk mail filtering that Apple offers for Mac OS X users?

Now one of my colleagues suggested to me at one time that a spam filter would be a little too resource intensive for a smartphone, but I’d think that a pocket computer that can double as a gaming machine is more than capable of processing email spam.

While I’m at it, why restrict email checking to 15 minute intervals when you don’t have a “Push” feature available, such as with MobileMe? Yes, scanning for new email every five minutes means a slight expenditure of system resources and battery life, but I hardly think it’s terribly demanding.

On the positive side of the ledger, the new volume switches on the left side of the iPhone 4 are not as easily pressed by accident. With the older model, it was all too easy to accidentally change the level simply by removing it from your pocket or a case, shades of the Motorola RAZR.

The other irritant is the way Push Notification messages are handled. They come in a modal dialog, which stops you in your tracks unless dismissed. If there’s a second message, it replaces the first, with no real way to recall the one that’s been discharged. This is one problem that appears to be dealt with in a smarter way with the Android OS, where you can recall system prompts of one sort or another. Besides, the Push dialog seems damned ugly compared to the otherwise elegant iOS interface.

I’m sure there are lots of wish lists for iOS 5. Let me simply include this as part of my more serious concerns. Most are, in the scheme things, quite minor. They don’t seriously impact my enjoyment of the iPhone, but I’m also the sort of perfectionist who keeps demanding more.

You just know that there will be a new version of the iPad this year, and barring some unforeseen corporate disaster at Apple, that expectation will come true. The same can be said about an iPhone 5, although how each of these products will be actually labeled is open to question.

Beyond those simple certainties, all bets are off, although there are some strong possibilities. Let’s explore them.

A big question for the iPad is whether Apple will attempt to match the high-resolution display that debuted in the iPhone 4 last year. But on a 9.7-inch screen, doubling the existing resolution, which means four times as many pixels, has to be costly; not necessarily for the updated graphics chip, but for the actual display. Can Apple do that and keep the current price structure?

It may well be, because they revealed, during this week’s quarterly conference call with financial analysts, that they are spending close to $4 billion for advance orders of new components. This is a smart way for Apple to leverage billions of dollars of clear and free cash to shore up availability of the key parts needed in their iconic gadgets.

One possible component is the LCD display. If Apple makes a huge deal with Samsung or their other display partners, they might be able to get those special iPad displays for far less money than otherwise. This would make it possible for a high-resolution iPad without raising the price. Absent that, Apple could offer two lines. One a trimmer version of the current model for $100 less for each configuration, and then an iPad Pro with the near-retina display and other goodies, for $100 above today’s prices.

Acting against this possibility is the fact that Apple doesn’t necessarily want to complicate their product lines, but remember they are still selling the 2009 iPhone 3GS, in an 8GB configuration, for $49. That’s a smart move, because folks who are used to free or low-cost cell phones can now get an iPhone without paying much up front, though the carriers will still get you in the end on their two-year contracts.

Whether or not the screen resolution changes, it’s almost a given that the next iPad will sport a front-facing camera, for FaceTime use, and perhaps a rear camera, although that would be rather an awkward configuration. Taking pictures with a smartphone, or a regular cell phone, is fairly trivial. Doing it with an iPad isn’t going to be as comfortable a process.

Now one key criticism against the iPad is that it weighs too much, although a pound and a half seems pretty light. But when you attempt to use it to read something with one hand, it’s going to become ungainly real fast. These are the advantages of, say, an Amazon Kindle, or perhaps the 7-inch tablet, even if that form factor is otherwise unproven.

Since I’m not a product designer, I wouldn’t pretend to know the best way to give the iPad a diet, beyond slimming the case and perhaps reducing the size of the screen bezel. Even a few ounces would be a revelation. One suggestion I’ve heard, and repeated here and on my radio show, is the use of carbon fiber perhaps for the rear enclosure, but that can also be expensive. Once again, consider the paragraph above about Apple’s substantial investment in raw materials, and maybe this is one of the parts they’re buying.

Insofar as the iPhone is concerned, the real question is how much change Apple needs to make after last year’s substantial redesign. If the revised antenna configuration on the CDMA version, built for the Verizon Wireless network, means a reduced likelihood of “Death Grip” situations, perhaps the next iPhone will have a similar revision for the GSM version. But it’s also true that the new antenna design may simply be required to support a different network scheme.

It may also be that Apple will devise a “world phone” design, containing radios for both CDMA and GSM. Such chips are already available, and I assume they could be configured in such a way that only the protocol required for a particular carrier is active, so battery life isn’t hurt. But it would reduce Apple’s costs, since they could leverage one design for all. That may also cover the added expense of a dual-mode chip. You may even see support of LTE, assuming reasonably bug-free and energy-efficient parts are available.

Now even if Apple doesn’t go the dual-mode route, buying an iPhone for a particular carrier would take care of the issues about whether you get the CDMA or GSM version. When it comes to the iPad, that can be a source of confusion, since the product is, with a few exceptions overseas, sold separate from a data contract. In that case, if you buy the “wrong version,” you’re still apt to be tied to a specific carrier, whereas a world iPad would make your choice of data services far simpler. That assumes you’re not just going to get the Wi-Fi edition, and hope for a nearby hotspot.

Past these essentials, the room for speculation is wide. Will the next iPad have an SD card slot? What about the mini-USB port required by new European Union requirements? Would an accessory adapter do the job, or will Apple simply offer onboard it as an optional means of connection and charging? When it comes to video output, will Apple take advantage of newer graphic chips to offer true 1080p resolution, same as Blu-ray? If true, it won’t be long before that feature ends up in an Apple TV revision.

The ball is now in your court, gentle reader.