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Imagine getting home after a hard day’s work in the year 2016: There’s no need for keys as you approach your house, since proximity sensors in the lock mean a simple iPhone voice authorization will open the door for you.

The house has been alerted to your arrival, so your Nest thermostat has adjusted the temperature to suit you, while your Philips Hue connected light bulbs change the lighting to fit your mood — predicted by analyzing your heart rate and schedule for that day. The iWatch on your wrist runs Jawbone app, letting you know your caffeine levels are a little high and that you should wait until 7:30 p.m. before going for a jog to ensure maximum sleep quality that night.

Five minutes after putting your car keys down, dinner’s ready. You’re running late, but your smart immersion cooker — which has been monitoring your location all day — has delayed cooking until the optimal start time.

Most Apple Store thieves we’ve seen prefer to go with the classic smash and grab technique, but according to federal court charges, one fraudster in Florida broke his Apple heist into 42 separate scams by using a simple but major flaw in Apple’s credit card processing system to plunder $309,768 worth of products from Apple’s retail locations.

We’re probably less than two months away from the announcement of the iPhone 6, but if you just can’t wait another minute to tell your fanboy friends that you’ve already pre-ordered the 6, luxury retailer Brikk is ready to accept your pre-orders. But it’s going to set you back at least $4,495.

“One day I’ll remember,” says Bilbo Baggins. “Remember everything that happened. The good, the bad. Those who survived, and those who did not.”

Thus starts the latest trailer for the upcoming sequel to The Hobbit movies: The Battle of the Five Armies. Check it out below in all it’s glory.

Hilton Hotels is planning to turn your iPhone into the ultimate control center for your entire hotel stay by allowing guests to check-in, choose an exact room, and even unlock your room, straight from its app.

The company announced its digital enhancements for the hotel experience will be available globally for over 650,000 rooms, at more than 4,000 hotels by the end of 2014, ensuring you won’t have to interact with a single human being the next time you stay at their hotels.

Apple’s recently acquired music streaming service, Beats Music, just received its biggest update since getting scooped up by Apple at the end of May, adding new features that let you fine tune your musical tastes on the service and view songs that were just served up in The Sentence.

If you’re a fan of stylish, true-to-the-comics movie adaptations, you’ve probably already seen Sin City. The trailer (below) released during last week’s Comic Con shows us the sequel, based on the second book in the Sin City series by Frank Miller, A Dame To Kill For.

Rodriguez (Spy Kids, Sin City) will produce and Miller (Dark Knight Returns, 300) will direct a script co-written by the two men and William Monahan (The Departed).

Actors returning include Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Powers Boothe, Mickey Rourke, and Bruce Willis. New folks to the series include Josh Brolin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Christopher Lloyd, Ray Liotta, Stacy Keach, Christopher Meloni, and yes, even Lady Gaga, who you can see as a waitress handing over some cash to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character in the trailer below.

While most of the other rumors about the upcoming iPhone 6 have tended to sync up with each other, one thing we’ve still yet to get a clear answer on is whether or not Apple’s next generation smartphone will feature a sapphire display.

The latest report, coming from LEDinside, claims that the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 won’t be incorporating sapphire displays, due to limited volumes of sapphire being produced this year — mostly as a result of sapphire ingot manufacturers yield rate being lower than expected, alongside other issues involved in sapphire glass processing.

Apple has been struggling to produce enough sapphire displays in time for the iPhone 6, but after going straight to the source of the freakishly indestructible glass – GT Advanced Technologies – MIT has learned of the company’s plans to use a giant machine that may solve all of Apple’s sapphire production problems, one slice of sapphire at a time.

The problem with sapphire glass is that while amazingly durable, it’s also ridiculously hard to produce in thin smartphone sized sheets. Apple’s current production methods involve taking a large chunk of sapphire and sawing it down to just a few hundred micrometers thick. It’s time consuming and wasteful, but GT’s new Hyperion 4 Ion Implanter technology could allow it to make paper thin sheets of pure crystal sapphire glass just by bombarding it with hydrogen ions.

Production issues continue to plague the 5.5-inch iPhablet, and while the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 is on target to launch in September, Apple may have just decided to pair the launch of its first wearable alongside its first foray into phablets, says one of Weibo’s top Apple leakers.

Tell me if you’ve heard this rumor before: the iPhone is getting NFC this year.

Well NFC fever is back again for 2014’s iPhone rumor season, only instead oozing from the mouths of misinformed analysts, a new rumor based on alleged iPhone 6 logic board claims that both the 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch iPhone 6s will be the first Apple devices to finally support near field communications.

Apple may be going harder than ever, while Microsoft is having to lay off 18,000 of its employees, but the Redmond, WA company is still intent on bragging about its “superiority” over Apple.

Taking a page out of the Samsung book of advertising-by-dissing-your-enemies, Microsoft has unleashed a new ad comparing its new Cortana virtual assistant with Apple’s virtual assistant Siri. And, wouldn’t you know it, in Microsoft’s version of events, Cortana blows Siri out the water.

Quite the surprise, huh?

Last week there were rumors that Swatch might be partnering with Apple to work on its iWatch project. Swatch quickly denied the report, saying that the only business relationship Swatch has ever had with a mobile phone maker is to supply integrated circuits and other electronic components.

Now a new piece of the puzzle has emerged, with Swatch CEO Nick Hayek providing Swiss newspaper NZZ am Sonntag with another reason why his company isn’t going to be helping Apple: because it’s making a smartwatch of its own.

The European Commission today gave its approval to Apple’s $3 billion takeover of Beats Electronics and Beats Music. The regulator concluded that the two companies are not close competitors, and that the headphones they sell are “markedly different in function and design.”

Apple is in talks to buy Swell, a startup described as “Pandora for talk radio,” according to several sources.

Swell’s service compiles different podcasts and sorts them into personalized streams, thereby acting as a sort-of podcast recommendation system. The deal would reportedly set Apple back a cool $30 million.

Family and a few close friends aside, very few people got the inside track on Steve Jobs.

One of the few exceptions was Doug Menuez, an award-winning documentary photographer. For almost a decade between 1985 and 1994, Menuez shot an unprecedented number of photos of Jobs during his wilderness years outside Apple. And, as can be seen in the gallery above, he also took some astonishing inside shots of Apple during this same time frame.

In the process, Menuez became one of the foremost documentarians of an incredible period in Silicon Valley history. To celebrate the launch of his new book, Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley 1985-2000, Menuez spoke with Cult of Mac about his background with one of the greatest tech entrepreneurs to ever live.

We’re increasingly obsessed with the idea of personal health tracking devices like the long-awaited iWatch, but current Apple devices can also be used to revolutionize medicine within hospitals.

A new report in the U.K. states that doctors and nurses at Middlesbrough’s James Cook University Hospital are using iPads and iPod touches to streamline the hospital’s current reliance on paper notes.

It’s time for the various residents of Bon Temps to face the music. Karma’s a bitch, and in the latest episode of the final season of this hit vampire romance TV show from HBO, we’re gonna watch most of the main characters deal with the consequences of their past behavior and poor choices. Andy, Holly, Bill, Sam, Sookie: Each of these True Blood staples have to stand up and own their life choices.

This is a pretty expository episode, so we spend a lot of time watching characters explain their situations in sometimes excruciating detail. Let’s hope that our karma for watching the show will be some more action-packed and hilarious scenes in the upcoming shows left in the season, rather than a payback for following the show for so long. We still have faith, though.

Spoilers abound below, so be warned. Find out what happened on last night’s episode after the jump.

Particularly with iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite set to make all your Apple devices work together better than ever, it’s important to have a neat way of keeping your iPhone, iPad and Mac in close proximity.

Looking to solve the problem of messy desktops, a new Kickstarter project aims to create the first all-in-one stand for Apple devices — featuring integrated dock and charging system for your mobile and tablet devices.

We may be on the verge of receiving a refreshed 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro line, according to a leaked pricing chart apparently from Apple’s Chongqing, China store.

The chart shows three different configurations of the MacBook. The first of these features an Intel Core i7 2.2 GHz processor and 16GB of RAM standard (the current 15-inch base model Retina MacBook Pro has 2.0 GHz Intel Core i7 and 8GB of RAM.) The second features a 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7 processor and 16GB of RAM (compared to the current 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 processor.)

A third, higher-end Retina MacBook is also included — boasting Intel’s new 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, 1TB of flash storage, and Intel’s Iris Pro graphics, alongside a NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M.

This week: Yosemite beta is not for the faint of heart; William Shatner is the coolest grandpa ever; to take on Apple, Microsoft doubles down on design; Apple inches closer to a digital wallet; why the Apple on your iPhone 6 could glow; iBeacons are a marketer’s best friend; and then… if you could ride any animal into battle, what would it be? We’ll answer that question and more on an all-new Get To Know Your Cultist.

Quietly chuckle your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the chuckles begin.

Our thanks to Lynda.com for sponsoring this episode! Learn virtually any application at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at Lynda.com.

Click on for the show notes.

Is Apple vs. Amazon the next “thermonuclear” tech war?

Perhaps not quite yet, but with Amazon moving into smartphones, and Apple choosing to stock the books Amazon refuses to, competition is certainly heating up. That may go some way toward explaining Apple’s acquisition of BookLamp, a startup described as the “Pandora for books,” which offers personalized book recommendations.

Yo went from being what was considered a dumb joke to an amazing success basically overnight. The app’s idea dead simple: let the user send only the word “Yo” to a friend in a push notification. Now there’s an API for the app and it’s being used to warn citizens about missile strikes in the Middle East.

As you can imagine, there are plenty of app makers trying to jump on the Yo bandwagon after all the attention it has been getting. One app that sticks out from the rest is AHOY, a new iPhone app that takes the Yo concept one step further by adding location to the mix.