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Every week Apple selects a paid app to become its “Free App of the Week” in the App Store, and it usually makes for a decent deal. But this week is the best promotion so far.

Things by Cultured Code, an Apple Design Award-winning task manager, is completely free through next Friday. That’s a total discount of $30.

Chevrolet has “built” a laser-powered race car for Gran Turismo 6 fans to rip around the PlayStation track.

And they didn’t go the expected route by souping up a Corvette, Camaro or even a Chevette. Instead they partnered with their friends from yesteryear, Chaparral, and came up with the Chaparral 2X Vision Gran Turismo (VGT) concept car.

Apple and Xiaomi executives got into a little trash talk fight at the World Internet Conference this week in China. Xiaomi’s CEO Lei Jun described his company as a “small miracle” that’s ready to dominate the smartphone world. But Apple’s general counsel, Bruce Sewell, who was also at the conference, wasn’t impressed with all of Xiaomi’s boasting.

Xiaomi’s sudden rise to being the world’s third largest smartphone maker has been nothing short of miraculous. Executives at the Apple copy-cat are bullish on the company’s future and hope to become the top smartphone maker in 5 to 10 years, but Sewell thinks that’s much easier said than done.

According to a new report from Bloomberg, Foxconn is set to spend $2.6 billion building a new factory in Taiwan exclusively to create displays for Apple.

Equipment installation for the factory is likely to begin next month, with the aim of starting mass production of panels by the end of 2015. The factory will require hiring an addition workforce of 2,300 people, and is going to be built at Innolux’s Kaohsiung Science Park campus in Southern Taiwan.

Foxconn currently has factories in China dedicated to assembling iPhones and iPads, but this will be the company’s first designed entirely with the goal of producing Apple components to go inside the devices.

Apple may build smoke detectors into future Macs and iOS devices, according to a patent application published Thursday.

As users move toward the smart home, courtesy of services like Apple’s HomeKit, the idea is that Macs, iPhones and iPads could intelligently monitor for signs of a fire and trigger various mechanisms accordingly.

This could mean sending users a text or email alerting them of the danger, calling 911 for emergency assistance, or even activating fire suppression equipment.

No matter what the reason, or who was at fault, the collapse in Apple’s relationship with former sapphire supplier GT Advanced Technologies came down to one thing: the latter company wasn’t able to meet Apple’s terms.

Now photos published by the Wall Street Journal show some of GTAT’s sapphire errors, made just days before Apple signed a deal for the company to produce sapphire displays to be used in next generation iPhones. The 578 pound sapphire cylinders — known as boules — featured multiple flaws, which rendered the majority unusable.

While Apple certainly pushes its manufacturers hard to seemingly achieve the impossible on tighter and tighter profit margins, the picture that emerges from the WSJ article is of GT as a chaotic company, struggling from the very start to fulfil Apple’s expectations.

Just as Steve Jobs had to go through some frustrating years of failure before returning to Apple to turn in around, so too is the Aaron Sorkin Jobs biopic experiencing its fair share of setbacks.

Following the recent news that Christian Bale has, err, bailed on the project, now Hollywood magazine Deadline is reporting that the movie is being put into turnaround by its studio, Sony Pictures. Turnaround refers to a deal whereby the rights to a particular movie are sold from one studio to another in exchange for the cost of development, plus interest.

Exactly why the film is supposedly being dropped by Sony isn’t known, particularly since the Sony-owned Columbia Pictures did so well both critically and commercially from Sorkin’s previous true tech drama, in 2010’s The Social Network. It may, however, have something to do with schedules.

My Cult of Mac colleague Killian is obsessed with the actor Tom Hanks to an almost worrying degree.

I’ve never been to his home before (Killian’s, not Hanks’ — although I’ve not been there either), but I like to imagine that it’s full of Forrest Gump and Castaway posters, with the focal point being a single lock of the actor’s hair kept in an airtight jar. Surrounded by candles, with an iPod dock playing the soundtrack to The Da Vinci Code on repeat.

At any other time of year this would seem irrelevant, were today not the occasion upon which Hanx Writer, a typewriter app created by actor and typewriter fan Hanks, went universal on iOS.

The U.S. Department of Justice has issued a chilling warning to Apple executives as a response to increased privacy protections added to iOS 8: Children might die because we can’t hack into bad guys’ iMessages.

Deputy Attorney General James Cole met with Apple executives last month, reports the Wall Street Journal, to discuss privacy issues, but after making the ridiculous claim that the blood of dead children will be on Apple’s hands if it doesn’t give the NSA access to iMessages, the talks have ended in a standoff.

Apple took the wraps of WatchKit yesterday and revealed an entirely new font created just for Apple Watch called San Francisco. Designers are heaping praise on the sexy new typeface that condenses at larger sizes to take up less space, and becomes easier to read at smaller sizes, but we can’t help but wish it was coming to OS X soon.

For those that can’t wait to interact with San Francisco on the Apple Watch there’s good news though: A developer named Wells Riley has released a bundle on GitHub that swaps Yosemite Helvetica Neue system font for Apple’s new Sans Serif creation.

To make San Francisco your Mac’s system font, follow these steps:

You’ll soon have Beats Music on your iOS device whether you want it or not.

Apple is planning to bake the streaming music service into iOS in early 2015, according to The Financial Times. The integration could happen “as early as March,” which would line up with the possibility of a media event to announce the rumored iPad Pro.

When it comes to the App Store, there’s rarely such a thing as a “free” app. If you’re not paying for it upfront you’ll probably get hit up with exorbitant in-app purchase offers later. So in a move to change the way apps are advertised on iOS, Apple had decided to remove the “Free” download button entirely.

Having been an avid Sim City player going back 20+ years, I will never not be excited about a new game in the franchise.

EA has just released a new trailer for its upcoming SimCity BuildIt worldwide launch, and it has to be said that it looks pretty darn fantastic.

Letting you do all the building, demolition, micro-management and, err, UFO survival the game series is known for, the mobile-only title incorporates full 360° controls, which means that you can explore your beautiful 3-D city from an angle you want.

Is there anything more punk rock than spending loads of money on in-app purchases for iPad games? If your answer is a resounding “yes, of course there is,” prepare to argue with former Sex Pistols screecher John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon.

Speaking with the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper, Lydon claims he spent “10,000 f*cking pounds” (around $15,600) during a two-year app-buying bender on his iPad.

“I got into Game of Thrones, Game of War, Real Racing, and I just wanted to up the ante,” he said, making downloading apps sound like the new version of throwing TVs out of hotel windows. “[L]ike an idiot I didn’t check myself. I’ve been checked now. But there’s a kid in me, see? A bit of my childhood was taken from me and I’m determined to bring it back.”

Apple plans to repurpose its factory in Mesa, Arizona, following the spectacular implosion of its relationship with sapphire manufacturer GT Advanced Technologies.

A report from Bloomberg cites Mesa City Manager Christopher Brady as the source of the information. Apple, for its part, has said that it wants to focus “on preserving jobs in Arizona” and will continue to “work with state and local officials as we consider our next steps.”

Google’s new Inbox app is a godsend for people like me who seem to teeter on the brink of inbox bankruptcy weekly, but there’s one problem with the killer Gmail manager: it’s not only available on iOS, Chrome, and Android.

The Inbox team might not be in a hurry to bring its service to Safari, but if you want don’t want to defect to Chrome just manage play with Inbox, our friend Rishi at Zinx has discovered how to access Inbox from Safari.

Here’s how to do it:

One of the first arguments that springs up in the many debates of Mac versus PC is cost. Traditionally, Apple computers come with premium price tags, which are almost always well-deserved. But there are a handful of Apple machines that were priced well above what you would normally expect to pay, even for Cupertino’s latest computer.

In today’s video, we take a look at the five most expensive Macs of all time — and tell you how much they would cost today with their price tags adjusted for inflation. You might think the new Retina 5K iMac is outrageously expensive, but compared to some of Apple’s older machines, it’s not that pricey.

It’s been decades since pagers played a central role in our tech lives, but the beeper is causing some headaches for Apple lately. A federal jury just slapped Apple with a $23.6 million fine for infringing patents related to ’90s technology.

Mobile Telecommunications Technologies sued Apple last year for violating several of its patents that govern two-way exchanges of data. Apple services such as iMessage, calendar invitations and emoji allegedly violated the patents, and after six hours of deliberation, the jury found Apple was guilty of five out of the six charges.

Another day, another app from Facebook.

That seems to be the trend lately for the social networking giant, as seemingly every aspect of its service has been siloed into its own app. The latest is Facebook Groups for, you guessed it, managing and interacting with different groups.

With the Apple Watch release still months away, plenty of details — like the timepiece’s price and battery life — remain unknown. But the release of WatchKit this morning sheds new light on Apple’s most personal product ever.

We dug through the new WatchKit programming guide and Apple Watch human interface guidelines this afternoon and found a few details that weren’t mentioned in the keynote, such as a special new font designed to look good at any size on the Apple Watch’s tiny face.

Here are five new Apple Watch details buried in the WatchKit SDK:

The mad dash to develop the first wave of Apple Watch apps has just begun, and to go along with the new WatchKit for devs, Apple has also released the first iOS 8.2 beta this morning.

iOS 8.2 beta 1 includes support for WatchKit, which allows Apple Watch apps to connect to and run processes on your iPhone in the background. In a press release announcing the update’s availability, Phil Schiller said, “With the iOS 8.2 beta SDK, developers can now start using WatchKit to create breakthrough new apps, Glances and actionable notifications designed for the innovative Apple Watch interface and work with new technologies such as Force Touch, Digital Crown and Taptic Engine.”

Release notes for the beta don’t mention other major new features, but we’ll report on any surprises we find, once we get it installed. The iOS 8.2 beta is available to registered developers in the iOS Dev Center, along with a new Xcode 6.2 beta as well.

You can also grab iOS 8.2 from the direct download links below:

As promised, Apple has given third-party developers tools to start making apps for the upcoming Apple Watch. Today the company announced the availability of WatchKit, its new SDK for creating app experiences on the wrist.

With WatchKit, developers will be able to make actionable notifications, Glances “for timely information accessible by an easy, quick look,” and eventually full-fledged apps. Early WatchKit partners like ESPN, Instagram, and American Airlines have already tested the new APIs for future versions of their apps.

We got a lot of great feedback from last week’s minimal iPhone 6 case roundup. Many of you suggested other cases to check out, and we got so many good recommendations that we decided to share them with everyone.

Not all of these cases are necessarily super slim and minimal, but they’re worth checking out if you’re in the market for something stylish and functional to cradle your precious iPhone 6 or 6 Plus.