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Apple has kept quiet on why its sapphire supplier suddenly went bankrupt, but after weeks of court wrangling, GT Advanced Technology’s COO has filed a revised declaration that reveals why Apple’s dream of sapphire iPhones went up in smoke in less than a year.

GTAT COO Daniel Squiller, says that the original plan was for Apple to buy 2,600 sapphire furnaces and other equipment that GTAT would then operate. However, after months of negotiations, the deal was changed so that GTAT would borrow up to $578 million from Apple to purchase furnace components and assemble furnaces that would be used to grow sapphire for Apple.

The company admits the deal came with huge risk for GTAT while shielding Apple, but because it had the potential to be revolutionary to GTAT’s business, they went ahead with it. Then everything went horrible wrong.

When you live in Apple’s world as a third-party developer, you are required to play by Apple’s rules. And sometimes those rules are subject to sudden change.

James Thomson, the developer behind the scientific calculator app PCalc, was notified today by Apple that his iOS 8 widget must be removed. The reason? A new stipulation that iOS widgets cannot perform calculations.

The reasoning behind Apple’s decision may never be known by Thomson or anyone outside the company, and that’s just the point. The App Store is Apple’s kingdom to rule, for better or worse.

Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige took to the stage at a special event at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood Tuesday to talk about the next slate of blockbuster films the company is planning to release over the next few years. The full docket, with projected dates, is as follows:

· 5/1/15 – Avengers: Age of Ultron
· 7/17/15 – Ant-Man
· 5/6/16 – Captain America: Civil War
· 11/4/16 – Doctor Strange
· 5/5/17 – Guardians of the Galaxy 2
· 7/28/17 – Thor: Ragnarok
· 11/3/17 – Black Panther
· 5/4/18 – Avengers: Infinity War Part I
· 7/6/18 – Captain Marvel
· 11/2/18 – Inhumans
· 5/3/19 – Avengers: Infinity War Part II

While most of us are clear on who The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy are, there are some lesser-known characters getting the full movie spotlight that you may not be aware of. Here’s how they fit into the larger Marvel cinematic universe.

Apple Pay’s biggest competitor backed by major retailers has been hacked before it even launched.
Retailers like Walmart, BestBuy, Gap, and CVS are waging a war against Apple Pay with their own mobile wallet solution, CurrentC, but the pending doom of their QR-code solution is looking even more obvious now, as the company just alerted customers that they’ve been hacked.

Customers who signed up to use CurrentC were notified today via email that hackers have “obtained the email addresses of some of you.”

Email addresses were the only information the hackers stole (because CurrentC isn’t even out yet), but we doubt this is going to make shoppers eager to share their social security number and bank account info with MCX’s partners, once the app launches next year.

Here’s the email:

One of my favorite games for the iPhone is Game Dev Story, an adorable and addictive game by Kairosoft that puts the player in the role of managing a team of video game developers.

Something about Noodlecake Games’s upcoming title, Bitcoin Billionaire, reminds me a lot of Game Dev Story. But befitting a game by the creators of Super Stickman Golf, it looks a lot funnier.

Following our report yesterday revealing several leaked shots for the next version of Microsoft Office for Mac, we’re hearing confirmation that not only are the shots legitimate, but that Office for Mac could be here sooner than you think.

iPhone owners who can’t wait for the Apple Watch can now change their home screens to a fresh interface inspired by Apple’s wearable UI, thanks to a hack for jailbroken devices.

This new tweak replaces the existing iOS look and feel — which has remained conceptually unchanged since the debut of the iPhone back in 2007 — with circular, bubble-looking icons that users can zoom in and out of to find their apps easier.

While the mod started out as nothing more than a concept, another developer has taken the idea and run with it, constructing a tweak called WatchSpring that replaces a jailbroken iOS 8 device’s SpringBoard with a working Apple Watch-style home screen.

Here’s how you get hold of it.

If there’s one thing Apple knows how to make, it’s money. Even so, the iPad Air 2 is one of the best value tablets Apple has ever made.

Even though it costs Apple roughly the same amount to make an iPad Air 2 as it did to make a first-gen iPad Air, Apple’s margins have actually gone down slightly on the superslim, A8X-powered tablet.

A proposed change in U.S. regulations could have massive implications when it comes to bringing about the kind of integrated Apple television set Steve Jobs talked about producing.

Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler has proposed a revision of rules that would afford Internet streaming services the same treatment as traditional cable and satellite television companies when it comes to negotiating with channel operators like HBO.

If the change is made, online providers would gain “access to programming owned by cable operators” and be able to negotiate licensing deals with content providers like HBO or local TV stations. Wheeler says the move would “encourage new video alternatives by opening up access to content previously locked on cable channels,” similar to the way regulatory changes in the ’90s enabled satellite TV to compete with cable operators.

Although iOS 8 got off to a slower start than iOS 7, it’s finally starting to rebound. New numbers suggest that over half of all customers have upgraded to iOS 8. But all’s not well yet. In fact, iOS 8 uptake is pretty much stagnant.

Christian Bale might seem like the perfect actor to play Steve Jobs. Like the Apple founder, Bale is a perfectionist who cares so deeply about his craft that he can come across like a raging lunatic.

Bale, who will star in Danny Boyle’s upcoming biopic about Jobs, might be the best hope yet for a riveting onscreen representation of Apple’s late leader. But for many Apple fans, a 1999 TV movie remains the definitive depiction of Jobs.

That movie is Pirates of Silicon Valley, which tells the story of Apple versus Microsoft during a 20-year stretch starting in the late-1970s. With Pirates of Silicon Valley turning 15 this year, Cult of Mac spoke with its director, Martyn Burke, about Noah Wyle (who plays Jobs in the film), threatened lawsuits, and the miraculous way Jobs spun a potentially disastrous bit of PR into good press.

Particularly as Apple extends its tentacles overseas into new markets like China and India, many pundits have suggested that Cupertino needs to make low-cost iPhones to compete with lower-end Android devices.

So will it? According to Apple’s product marketing executive Greg Joswiak the answer is a resounding, emphatic “hell no!”

It’s not like bagging a burrito at Taco Bell takes a long time, but the fast-food chain’s hot new mobile app makes ordering unbelievably fast and frictionless.

The app promises that you’ll be able to order anything off the menu, pay for it, and have it prepared for you when you arrive. Not quite revolutionary, but a deliberate stab at modernizing the drive-thru experience. Order from your iPhone, and you get to skip the line.

It’s not every day that I get to write about Taco Bell, so I jumped at the opportunity to give it a test drive. Here’s my experience with the Taco Bell app from start to finish:

A number of users have experienced graphics issues with their 2011 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro models, and following a Facebook group and change.org petition which have gathered a collected 25,000 names, law firm Whitfield Bryson & Mason LLP has filed a class action lawsuit against Apple on behalf of affected consumers.

“I’ve been involved with a number of lawsuits with Apple, going back decades, and I’m not aware of one that affected so many people, that Apple refused to do anything about,” says Gary E. Mason, the Managing Partner of Whitfield Bryson & Mason, speaking with Cult of Mac. “At the very least these consumers are entitled to a discount on a new laptop to help them transition to a serviceable device.”

Mason says that while only tens of thousands of customers have come forward so far, the affected number of consumers could be in the hundreds of thousands.

The Federal Trade Commission is finally going after AT&T for throttling customer’s data speeds, by filing an official complaint that the company has lowered speeds on LTE up to 95% on unlimited data plans.

FTC chairwoman Edith Ramirez expounded on the lawsuit today stating, “the issue is simple: Unlimited means unlimited.” The FTC also alleges that AT&T engaged in unfair or deceptive acts and practices that affected commerce. And they’ve got the numbers to back up their lawsuit, with claims that AT&T illegally capped users’ data speeds at 128 Kbps.

Here’s AT&T’s response to the lawsuit:

Apple’s mission to replace your wallet with Apple Pay began just last week with support from more than 200,000 stores in the United States, but some merchants have already launched a war against the new payment platform.

Over the weekend, CVS and Rite Aid stores blocked Apple Pay access at their registers, marking the first counterattack in what will likely be a fierce battle to own your digital wallet. Apple Pay’s growth is unprecedented, but the anti-Apple Pay group is backed by a superhero-size team of retail megastores conspiring to make debit and credit card fees extinct. They’ll stop at nothing to see it happen, even it means hurting Apple (or themselves) in the process.

Here’s everything you need to know about the war on Apple Pay and why it’s doomed to fail.

Two years ago, Nick den Engelsman started a band with a couple of friends. As they worked on recording songs, life got in the way, what with getting jobs, getting married, having babies, and the like.

The group decided it would be really nice to have an app that let them record parts of their songs individually, and then combine all the tracks into one song. They couldn’t find one.

Most multi-track recording apps like GarageBand will let you share files across services like Dropbox, but a simple “record and share” app wasn’t available.

This is how Composr was born. Here’s how it works.

What if you could skip the late-night line at Taco Bell by ordering from your phone? It would be Doritos Locos heaven.

Taco Bell is trying to reinvent the drive-through with a new mobile app released today for iOS and Android. The entire Taco Bell menu is available inside the app, with all the customization options you can get in-person (and some app-exclusive food items coming in the future). Most importantly, you can place orders from anywhere and have them ready when you arrive.

Apple added two new channels to the Apple TV today with FYI from the A&E network and Feeln being both being added to the line up.

The FYI channel (formerly known as The Biography Channel) brings a mix of lifestyle programming that features DYI, cooking, home improvement, and fashion shows, while Hallmark’s Feeln channel adds a new family friendly movie streaming service to the Apple set-top box.

One of the many, many things that Apple does right is trackpads. Not only is the trackpad hardware that Apple uses in the MacBook lineup the best in the world (seriously, I’ve never used a non-Apple trackpad that even came close), but the software backing it up is world-class.

A lot of that has to do with the library of consistent trackpad gestures Apple has built into OS X over the years. Compared to OS X, Windows feels downright schizophrenic when you’re using gestures. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. But it now appears that Microsoft is putting an end to the trackpad schizophrenia by borrowing Apple’s approach to gestures.

If you’re looking for a good keyboard for your iPad Air 2, Logitech has just announced three new beauties, including a pair of sleek keyboard cases.

The top awards for the 50th Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards have been announced at London’s Natural History Museum. More than 42,000 entries from 96 countries were submitted this year, making it the biggest event in the history of the awards.

There were many incredible entries, but the one that really grabbed us was the beautiful photo you see above, taken by Marsel Van Oosten, an extraordinarily talented photographer from the Netherlands. It shows a Japanese monkey submerged in water, using an iPhone.

A patent published today shows that Apple is investigating new halogen free, flame-retardant materials for use in its devices.

According to Apple, only about 12% of plastics currently contain flame retardants. An increased use of such materials would improve the safety of electrical wiring and electronic devices, and help reduce the number of fires caused by electronic devices as a result.

Halogenated flame retardants have been found to be effective in many plastics, but these are increasingly regulated as a result of environmental concerns. Since sustainability is a big topic for Apple, the company therefore wanted to discover a material that would possess similar fire-retardant qualities, while also not being damaging to the environment.

Tuesday’s patent describes a material with these qualities, that also produces only negligible amounts of toxic substances while burning. As per Apple, the material could be used in devices including the iMac, MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPad.