TECH POWER RANKINGS: The 10 coolest things in tech this week

Despite its dominance in the tech industry, it feels like there's a lull around Apple right now. iPhone sales recently declined for the first time. The iPad and Apple Watch are doing fine sales-wise, but they're not generating much excitement. That's probably why Apple CEO Tim Cook went on CNBC's "Mad Money" this week to talk about future products. He promised Jim Cramer, and by extension the world, that "we have great innovation in the pipeline" and "we are going to give you things that you can't live without, that you just don't even know you need today." Apple will show off some new products and services at WWDC next month, hopefully we'll get a glimpse of what Apple's been working on behind the scenes.

The biggest online retailer has been on a roll lately. Capitalizing on its success with Echo, Amazon released two new Echo products last month, and more recently it introduced a high-end e-reader called the Kindle Oasis. So what if it's crazy expensive? It's really cool! On the software side of things, Amazon last week began offering its massive video catalogue as standalone service you can access for $9 a month a la Netflix. This is good news for Amazon's original shows like "Transparent," but it's also good for Amazon's Prime service, since the new video service should encourage people to instead access Amazon's $99 a year service that includes Amazon Video, plus a ton of other perks.

All of these new products — the new Echos, the new Kindle, and the standalone video service — are designed to encourage people to buy into Amazon Prime, and this smart strategy appears to be working extremely well. Amazon had a stellar earnings report last week, and the company's various businesses, especially related to consumer tech, are looking very strong.

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is an athlete and an entertainer, but this week, he topped the App Store charts with his new app "Rock Clock," which wakes you up when The Rock wakes up (usually to work out, or maybe eat some cod) using some hilarious Rock-made ringtones. It was also The Rock's birthday on Monday. The Rock is having a great week.

Apple's streaming music service got off to a rocky start last year, and it still pales in comparison to Spotify, in my personal opinion. But there was some good news this week for Apple Music: Drake's new album, an Apple Music exclusive, topped the Billboard charts and even leapfrogged Beyonce's incredible new album. But more importantly, reports this week said Apple would be giving Apple Music a pretty big overhaul this year to make the app more user-friendly. While the service still has a way to go to catch up to Spotify's number of users (13 million versus 30 million), a big exclusive album and forthcoming improvements are definitely good news.

Using mobile apps to alter your selfies — either by face swapping or through a variety of crazy filters — is one of the hottest things on the internet right now. Most of the best face-swapping and filter effects come from Snapchat, but even Facebook is working on similar features for its own platform after the company purchased the popular face-swapping app MSQRD a couple of months ago. These simple innovations have created some really fun trends, like people face-swapping to make museums more fun or presidential candidates using face-swaps to mock and provoke each other.

There's incredible excitement surrounding Tesla thanks to the Model 3, Tesla's first truly affordable electric car that was unveiled last month. With 400,000+ pre-orders, CEO Elon Musk says Tesla plans to deliver 500,000 vehicles per year by 2018, a full two years ahead of the schedule. And its most recent car, the Model X, is a blast to drive. Tesla is also working hard on building new factories to boost production, as well as finishing up its Gigafactory in Nevada to build batteries for its next cars. Tesla and Musk are building the future of transportation with a great deal of urgency and tenacity.

Snapchat has gotten monstrously huge. Can you believe people watch 10 billion videos on Snapchat every day? That’s up from 8 billion videos viewed per day just two months ago. Even presidential candidates are using the app to taunt each other. It’s doing extremely well because it’s fun to use and it sparks creativity, as Tech Insider's Alex Heath explained this week. Even Facebook is looking to mirror Snapchat’s features, like filters, which are a hallmark feature of Snapchat. And just this past week, Snapchat helped two pairs of college students find love. We can't help but feel like Snapchat's mobile dominance is just getting started.

SpaceX, another ambitious company from Elon Musk, has been turning lots of heads recently — even President Obama has taken note. Late last week SpaceX announced its plan to send a Dragon spacecraft to Mars as soon as 2018 — astronaut Buzz Aldrin previously told Tech Insider that it'd take at least 25 years for that to happen. And on Friday morning, SpaceX replicated its landing of a rocket booster from April 8 by successfully landing its Falcon 9 booster on a drone ship a couple of hundred miles away from Cape Canaveral, Florida. As Tech Insider's Dave Mosher notes, the May 6 rocket landing was much more difficult than the previous one — these accomplishments are finally making people believe that SpaceX could put humans on Mars within our lifetimes.

What a week for Elon. Tesla reported earnings on Wednesday, which were better than expected, and Musk announced a big shift in Tesla's strategy to produce more cars even sooner than expected, which is great for consumers and fans. On top of that, his other company SpaceX pulled off another incredible feat by landing its Falcon 9 rocket booster on a floating platform in the ocean on Friday morning.

Musk doesn't seem to be fazed by his lofty goals; in fact, he goes to extraordinary lengths to meet them or even surpass them. Musk said this week he is "hell-bent on [Tesla] becoming the best manufacturer on Earth" — so much so that he admitted to having a sleeping bag in a conference room next to the production line so he can ensure the manufacturing process goes smoothly. Only Musk seems to have the vision to power all of these ideas, and his quirky behavior only makes him a more magnetic figure. So many important future projects — electric self-driving cars, reusable rockets, space travel, etc. — are under his control, and it's exciting to see him actually achieve the goals he creates for his various companies.