Google is planning to bring its fancy new Assistant to iOS, according to a new report.

The virtual assistant will be available inside a standalone app, and a “trusted source” claims it will arrive soon.

Apple is adding a spectacular new retail store to its collection — but you’ll have to visit Milan to see it.

Located in the city’s Piazza Liberty, the store will take a note out of Apple’s iconic Fifth Avenue Apple store in New York by being located underground, with access via a special elevator. Or, in this case, a spectacular staircase entrance located between two waterfalls.

Check out a couple more pictures below.

More than 230,000 computers in 150 countries have been hit by a cyberattack that encrypts data until a ransom has been paid. It’s thought to be the biggest in history, with India, Taiwan, and several European countries being the worst effected.

If you use a Mac, you have nothing to worry about for now, since this particular “ransomware” only targets Windows PCs. However, the number of attacks built for macOS is rising at a rapid rate every year.

So, what exactly is ransomware, and how can it be avoided? Here’s what you need to know.

For all the convenience of mobile technology, it can be a drag having to keep our devices juiced up. Whatever your situation, we’ve rounded up some top shelf charging upgrades that’ll offer new ways to juice up your most-used devices. We’ve got a universal Lightning dock, a wireless charging station for Apple Watch, a set of extra long set of Lightning cables and super sleek USB charging hub for your car. Everything’s going for a healthy discount, read on for more details:

Apple’s Amazon Echo rival standalone Siri speaker will come with a touch-sensitive display, claims KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

In a note to clients over the weekend, Kuo suggested that the Siri home speaker will have a “touch panel,” although it’s not known whether this will be a full-on screen or a simpler touch-based interface of some sort.

Over the past few weeks a new Mac malware called OSX/Dok has been all over the news. The Trojan horse accessed user’s Macs through email phishing. Once opened, it prevented users from doing anything on their Mac until they installed a bogus software update.

Malware attacks have been skyrocketing as of late, which means it’s more important than ever to be aware.

In today’s video, I’m going to show you 4 ways to help keep your Mac safe from malware.

The MP3, the iconic music compressions format partly popularized by the iPod, has been declared dead by its creators.

Licensing of the technology has been the responsibility of German company the Fraunhofer Institute. In a statement, the institute revealed that it is terminating licensing patents and software related to MP3. It’s the end of an era!

The Legend of Zelda will finally break away from Nintendo consoles to grace Android and iOS devices in 2018, according to a new report.

The first ever Zelda game on mobile will be developed by DeNA, the studio behind Super Mario Run and Fire Emblem Heroes.

Apple has acquired an AI company as part of its continued push to embrace artificial intelligence.

The company in question is the Menlo Park-based Lattice Data, which specializes in taking unstructured, “dark” data and transforming it into more useful, structured information. Apple acquired around 20 engineers as part of the deal.

Ever wanted to run your own AI startup, hopefully without bringing about the end of humanity in the process? A new game from the maker of the popular CARROT series of iOS apps gives you exactly that opportunity.

That’s just one of the great apps we’ve got covered in this week’s Awesome Apps roundup. We’ve also got a Snapchat update, a Steam gaming classic finally landed in the App Store, and a great Myst-inspired architectural puzzle game. Check out our picks below.

All our favorite videos are available to us online. Unless, of course, there’s no internet connection. When you’re on a flight or just away from WiFi and looking to pass the time, or if you’ve got uses for video that YouTube just won’t allow, you can use Movie Sherlock Pro to easily stockpile movies, shows, and all your other favorite streaming videos straight to your Mac. You’ll be able to access and work with all your videos in full HD, any time, anywhere. And right now you can get Movie Sherlock Pro for just $15 at Cult of Mac Deals.

It pays to experiment with 3-D Touch, the feature that lets you press harder on your iPhone’s screen to get extra functions. But while we may be used to force-touching app icons, there are all kinds of other spots where it works. For instance, you press on the row of icons at the bottom of the Control Center to access some fantastic shortcuts.

In this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine, we show you how to use Apple’s Music Memos app to record your musical ideas as well as how to hook a guitar up to your iPhone and rock out.

Learn about Tekserve’s impressive Apple computer artifact collection which is now on display in a museum in the Ukraine —  at the headquarters of software developer MacPaw.

Check out Cult of Mac Watch Store’s first major sale on Apple Watch straps! Enjoy 20 percent off great brands including Meridio, Strapple, Nyloon and more!

Here are this week’s top stories.

As the weather warms up, we’re still rounding up the hottest new deals at the Cult of Mac Store. This go-round, we’ve got a set of future-ready wireless earbuds, a swiss army knife for iOS data, a full terabyte of super secure cloud storage, and a tool that’ll help you finally reach the bottom of your inbox. Best of all, everything is discounted by more than 60 percent. Read on for more details:

This week on The CultCast: It’s official — the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote takes place June 5. Don’t miss our WWDC 2017 hardware expectations! Plus: Apple quietly acquires one of the world’s best sleep-tracking technologies; why Amazon’s Prime Video app may finally be coming to your Apple TV; our first impressions of the Amazon Echo Show, and the features we hope Apple steals from it; and stick around for a very weird, very tribal “What We’re Into,” the segment where we reveal all the non-tech stuff we’re currently digging.

Our thanks to Casper, maker of the internet’s favorite mattress, for supporting this episode. Learn why Casper is tops and save $50 off your order at casper.com/cultcast.

The iPhone’s Quad-LED True Tone flash is pretty good as camera flashes go, but you should never use it to take actual photos, unless you want shiny-faced, red-eyed people in your portraits. Instead, you should put it to work in more useful applications. And no, we don’t just mean using it as a flashlight next time you take a trip into the basement.

Updated: May 11, 2017

The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are Apple’s first iPhones to drop the headphone jack. And while you can keep using your old headphones by plugging them into the adapter that comes in the box, that gets old as soon as you discover you left the little dongle at home connected to a speaker, and you can’t listen to any music.

You’ve got two options. One, stick with a cable and buy some Lightning headphones. That’s fine, but then you can only use them with recent-vintage iOS devices, and you can’t charge your device while you use them. Or two, go wireless. That means Bluetooth, either the vanilla kind, or Apple’s augmented Bluetooth headphones, with the special W1 chip added to make pairing easier.

PDFs are fantastic. If you send somebody a PDF, you know it will look exactly the same on their computer as it does on yours. Same if you print it. But if your PDF contains a lot of images, it can quickly swell to an impractical size, making email impossible. Today we’re going to find out how to shrink that huge PDF dramatically, while making almost no difference in quality to the images therein. And we’ll do it using an app that’s already on your Mac, hidden in the Utilities folder: ColorSync Utility.

Did you know that you can shoot video and take still photos on your iPhone at the same time?

If not, you definitely need to watch Apple’s latest series of iPhone 7 videos that offer tips on how to capture amazing photos with the camera that’s always with you. Apple posted four more videos today that go with the other photography tutorials that came out yesterday. Now you can learn more about selfies, better angles, golden hour and more.

Watch all four new videos:

A merger between Sprint and T-Mobile could be back on the table, according to a new report that claims informal talks between the two carriers sparked up again this week.

Sprint attempted to acquire T-Mobile back in 2014 but the deal fell apart because of regulatory concerns. Now the heads of both companies have expressed to investors that they’re willing to consider consolidating again.

According to Goldman Sachs, the iPhone 8 is set to be Apple’s priciest iPhone ever by quite a wide margin. A note from analyst Simona Jankowski claims the next-gen iPhone will carry the suitably next-gen price of $1,000.

More specifically, Jankowski predicts that the 128GB iPhone 8 will sell for $999, while the 256GB version will set you back a whopping $1,099.

Consumer-level drones are fun, but someone with a proper racing drone can pull aerial moves like Luke Skywalker — and it can make anybody jealous. Racing and doing acrobatics requires a better drone and more experience than most people have money or time for. That makes the Aerix Black Talon an exciting option for anybody looking to up their drone game.

It’s an affordable, high-performance drone that will scratch your itch for speed and maneuverability. It sports a range of flying options, a built-in HD camera and other great features. And right now, you can get an Aerix Black Talon for just $99.99 at Cult of Mac Deals.

Apple has added a new “Mother’s Day Challenge” for the Apple Watch, rewarding anyone who can complete a walk, run or wheelchair workout of one mile or more.

Those who complete the challenge get an addition badge in the Activity app, alongside new stickers they can us in Messages, to casually show off among their friends.

Apple has awarded Corning the first grant of its $1 billion investment aimed at boosting high-tech manufacturing jobs in the United States. The glassmaker will receive $200 million.

Corning has worked with Apple for a decade — ever since the original iPhone’s Gorilla Glass — to create the glass found on its devices. Apple’s contribution as part of its “Advanced Manufacturing Fund” will support Corning’s R&D, capital equipment needs, and state-of-the-art glass processing.

I keep telling myself I’m going to buy an old wooden camera with a brass barrel lens and take one of those workshops where I learn some 19th-century photographic process. But I know myself. The steps are exacting and tedious, the chemistry complicated and my patience and attention for such details could fit in a pixel.

So when imaging software company Macphun developed a beautiful set of one-click presets that emulate tintypes and other old photo finishes, I felt like I found a process I could master.