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The verdict is in, and after nearly a decade of legal wrangling, Apple has prevailed in the class-action lawsuit seeking over $1 billion in damages by iPod owners who claimed the company conspired to kill competing music services by adding restrictions to iTunes.

The eight-person jury found Apple not liable of adding DRM restrictions as an anti-competitive move toward rival players like RealNetworks from 2006 to 2009. The Verge reports that the jury unanimously delivered the verdict this morning and said that iTunes 7.0 is a “genuine product improvement” that increased security for consumers.

Third-party developers are already making apps for the Apple Watch, but they’re doing so with one hand tied behind their backs.

Coders that Cult of Mac spoke with are pleasantly surprised by the opportunity to bring apps to the Watch so early, but many note they must abide by severe limitations to get their apps ready for the Apple wearable’s launch next spring.

What do you get for the Apple nut in your life? You know the type. They live and breathe Apple — but they already have every Apple product under the sun. Plus all the accessories.

iPod? Got it. iPhone wallet case? Got it. Steve Jobs bobblehead? Got it.

Well, I’ll bet a testicle they don’t have some of this stuff.

Apple is back with a new tearjerker of a Christmas ad, entitled “The Song.” Like last year’s Emmy-winning TV spot for the holidays, the company has chosen to showcase how its products make people feel, rather than what they do.

This time around, a young musician uses Garageband on her Mac to make a song for her grandmother. Expect to start seeing this on TV quite a bit over the next couple of weeks.

If you needed any more confirmation that Windows Phone is dead in the water, two of its most high profile supporters have abandoned it for the iPhone.

Veteran Microsoft journalists Ed Bott and Tom Warren both published essays this week in which they criticized Windows Phone for its shortcomings and announced that they’ve stopped using Windows Phones personally. Citing a lack of carrier and third-party app support, both agreed that Windows Phone has missed its shot at being a real competitor in the smartphone market.

Apple scooped up a couple architectural awards this week for the stunning engineering behind its magnificent Glass Lantern store at the Zorlu Center in Istanbul Turkey.  The judges said it ‘takes structural glass technology to a new dimension’, and even though we’ve never been inside the Zorlu store it’s not hard to see why it’s getting showered with awards after looking at these pictures.

The Zorlu Store is the first Apple Store created by the same architectural firm behind the new spaceship campus in Cupertino, and it looks like the same amount of attention to detail and minimalist thought that goes into the creation of an iPhone was also poured into the new award-winning Apple temple.

Take a tour of the exquisite store below:

Though he’s toyed with escape games for years, Turkish developer Maruf Nebil didn’t get hooked on the genre until 100 Floors hit the App Store in 2012. When The Room Two upped the ante with gorgeous 3-D environments a year later, Nebil set himself a devilish task: To create an unbeatable game that was also undeniably beautiful.

“I decided to make my game the hardest of all of them,” the 25-year-old developer said, with perhaps an evil laugh. “It’s like all 100 floors in a single room.”

While some games in this genre are about as fun and fulfilling as one of those “spot the hidden object” puzzles from a Highlights magazine, others prove truly challenging.

Some might say this type of game is purely for masochists, but others get lost in the obtuse challenge of finding hidden objects and solving maddening puzzles, all while trapped within a virtual room.

You can wait until the 2030s when NASA hopes to land astronauts on Mars. Or, if you have four minutes to spare right now, you can see what it is like to stand on the edge of the red planet’s Victoria Crater or catch a Martian sunset.

Erik Wernquist will even throw in a side of rings — Saturn’s that is — for watching his awe-inducing short film, Wanderers, which is embedded below.

“I am always inspired by reading about astronomy, and planetary astronomy in particular,” Wernquist told Cult of Mac. “And when I read about, or see pictures from places, I often fantasize about what it would … feel like to actually be there.”

A new app called Workflow aims to close the divide between the power of OS X and the convenience of iOS. By offering curated and custom workflows, the app can automate just about anything you’d want to do on the iPhone or iPad — along with actions you probably haven’t thought of before, like calling an Uber car to take you to your next meeting with one tap.

It’s an ambitious undertaking for any developer, but what makes Workflow even better is that it was created by two brilliant teenagers with great aspirations for making mobile devices as powerful as they can be.

The wallet-free future Apple promised with the iPhone 6 might finally be upon us in 2015, but only if you live in Iowa.

The state’s Department of Transportation says it will be the first state to ever allow citizens to use an official state app that will serve as a drivers license and ID. Iowa’s mobile app will reportedly contain all the same information found on the plastic license in your wallet, plus they’re adding a scannable bar code that links to DOT databases so all your info is up-to-date.

Some of the biggest companies that power America’s Internet, including Apple’s new enterprise partner IBM, have come out in opposition of President Obama’s proposal to reclassify broadband as a “Title II” service.

In an open letter written to the FCC, Congress, and Senate leaders, over 60 of the biggest companies that build the technology that make the Internet possible have advised that such a “dramatic reversal” in policy would significantly hurt their businesses. The list of companies include Intel, IBM, Qualcomm, Cisco, Corning and tons of others who aren’t going to let the FCC’s big decision next year go down without a fight.

Here’s the full roster of anti-Title II companies:

I love the idea of being able to answer a phone call on my Mac, or even on my iPad. The convergence of this communication technology seems like it has great potential.

In reality, though, I end up getting three rings for every call, each slightly time-shifted from the rest, as I sit in my office/living room with my iPhone, iPad and Mac. You’d think that such an intelligent system would know that I had all three devices in one room, and only ring through to one specified device. Until Apple figures that out, maybe in an iOS update or OS X 10.11, there’s only one thing you can do: Disable the heck out of it.

Here’s how.

Remember being lost in the 8-bit world of Atari and Nintendo? When Adam Lister was a boy, he couldn’t spend enough time in his basement playing Pong, Space Invaders or Donkey Kong.

Games and graphics, of course, evolved, and the chiptune music of those game consoles went silent long ago. But the graphic language where characters are a rough collection of cubes and rectangles still speaks to Lister.

It is the lens through which he views art history and pop culture in a series of more than 250 watercolor paintings he created over a three-year period.

My mission to build a powerful gaming Hackintosh for $650 — $50 less than Apple’s midrange Mac mini — is almost complete.

In Part 1 of this guide, I covered the components I purchased for my build and recommended extras and alternatives for those with different budgets.

In Part 2, I walked you through assembly of the screaming machine.

Now it’s time to install the software.

Believe it or not, building your Hackintosh is the easy bit; getting OS X to run on a machine it was never designed for is the real challenge.

But with time, patience and a little bit (OK, plenty) of frustration, you can make it happen.

Here’s how.

If Aaron Sorkin had his way, Tom Cruise would be Steve Jobs.

That’s one of the juicy details to have surfaced from leaked emails between Sorkin and Sony, the studio Sorkin had originally partnered with to make the film. The leaks also reveal the controversial casting decision that ultimately caused Sony to give up the film to Universal.

A Mac is the ultimate tool for creatives — you’ll find Apple computers littered throughout graphic design houses, music and video studios, marketing agencies and newsrooms.

Chances are, if you know a creative, you know a Mac user.

So, what are you going to buy them for Christmas? If you’re stuck for ideas, let us help.

Our gift guide for creatives will help you pick the perfect present.

Whether you’re looking for an affordable stocking stuffer or a budget-breaking gesture they’ll never forget, we’ve got you covered.

Now that we’ve got all the parts for our Hackintosh, it’s time to put them all together. This is the really fun part of this project: You’re turning processors and chips and motherboards into a working computer that’s going to do all kinds of things for you.

You’ll get an incredible sense of satisfaction at the end — especially if you’re building a computer for the first time.

In this piece, I’ll walk you through the building process from start to finish.

Building a computer is actually a pretty simple process — much simpler than most people realize. So long as you’re careful with the components and you make sure you’re installing them in the right places, there’s little chance anything will go wrong.

I recently decided it was time to get a proper desktop computer. I needed it predominantly for work, but I wanted it to be powerful enough to play the latest games in 1080p without worrying about stuttering or terrible frame rates.

The new Mac lineup didn’t offer a perfect fit — the Retina 5K iMac was too expensive, and the new Mac mini simply wasn’t powerful enough — so I set myself a goal: To build a gaming machine with a dedicated video card, capable of running OS X, for around the price of a Mac mini.

I set a budget of $650 for my build. That’s $150 more than the base model Mac mini, but $50 less than the midrange model. In this piece, I’ll take you through the components I purchased and why I chose them, and how I put them all together. Next week, I’ll show you how I installed OS X to turn my DIY gaming rig into a Hackintosh.

NASA’s spaceship of tomorrow might make a critic of skeuomorphic design cringe.

Orion, which flew successfully on an unmanned test Friday and is seen as a critical first step toward flying a crew to Mars, is guided by sophisticated computer control panels.

But instead of a modern digital interface, NASA designed the controls to look like something from the Gemini missions from the ’60s. Orion’s computer screens are full of virtual flip switches and levers that would put Yuri Gagarin at ease.

It’s a little like Apple putting a virtual rotary dial on an iPhone.

We all like our email signatures to look fantastic. Apple Mail began letting you make your special mark with an HTML-style email signature with OS X Lion back in 2011.

The process of setting up an HTML signature in Apple Mail has only gotten more complex over the years, unfortunately. Now it takes a bit of patience and a sturdy sense of adventure, but it’s not too difficult.

If you want to create your own HTML signature for Apple’s Mail app on OS X Yosemite, keep reading.

We here at Cult of Mac love bicycles almost as much as we love our iPhone 6 Pluses and iMac Retina 5Ks.

Maybe it’s the feeling of almost flying. Or the passionate design coming out of the bicycle industry. Or maybe it is just the idea of being a part of something else that drives intense passions in people. Whatever it is, we love it.

So we scoured high and low to bring you a list of crazy gift ideas for yourself or for your two-wheeled companions.
Take a look, but remember to take a deep breath before firing up your Apple Pay.

The research reads like a Surgeon General’s warning: Prolonged periods of sitting can lead to obesity, heart disease, blood clots and spinal compression, according to the latest medical studies.

To combat this modern office horror, an artist and an architecture firm from the Netherlands have re-imagined the office with all the chairs pulled out from under us. The exhibit, called The End of Sitting, is a geometric landscape of surfaces of varying heights on which to lean.

“The chair and desk are no longer unquestionable starting points,” Erik and Ronald Rietveld, partners at Dutch firm Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances, told Cult of Mac. “In our society, almost the entirety of our surroundings have been for sitting while evidence from medical research suggests that too much sitting has adverse health effects.”

The iPhone 6 Plus has only been on the market for a few months, but according to a report from Kantar, Apple’s bigger than big device captured 41% of U.S. phablet sales in the quarter ending with October 2014.

What’s even more impressive is that Apple managed to take a huge chunk of the market with only one full month of sales in the quarter. Kantar reports that among smartphones with a 5.5-inch screen or larger, Apple is absolutely dominating the trendy new category that now represents ten percent of all smartphone sales.

Steve Jobs made an appearance Monday as a key witness in Apple’s most recent antitrust lawsuit — courtesy of a video deposition taped shortly prior to his death in 2011.

The lawsuit concerns a long-running class action antitrust lawsuit dating back to 2005. It is argued by the plaintiffs that Apple gained an unfairly monopolistic position by blocking competitors from putting their music on iPods.

Jobs avoided many of the questions he was asked during the 2-hour video deposition, saying that “I don’t remember,” “I don’t know” or “I don’t recall” a total of 74 times — including when he was asked if he was familiar with what the lawsuit was about.

A few typically snappy Steve Jobs moments did crop up, however. Responding to a question about the former iTunes rival Real Networks, Jobs replied, “Do they still exist?”

In a universe where things worked out a bit differently, Ronald Wayne would be a billionaire.

When Apple was incorporated on April 2, 1976, Wayne was named alongside Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as one of three founders. Wayne owned a 10 percent stake in the company, a fact that raises questions about who owned apple.

However, just 12 days after Apple started up — feeling out of his depth because he “was standing in the shadow of intellectual giants” — Wayne threw in the towel and sold his shares for just $800.

“I was 40 and these kids were in their 20s,” Wayne told Cult of Mac. “They were whirlwinds — it was like having a tiger by the tail. If I had stayed with Apple I probably would have wound up the richest man in the cemetery.”