Tim Cook is set for a verbal shootout in China as he meets with high-ranking officials in Beijing later this month to discuss some critical issues Apple faces in the country.

The visit comes at a time when Apple is facing various problems in China, including the loss of its exclusive iPhone trademark, and the Chinese government’s decision to ban the company from operating its iBooks and iTunes Movies stores locally.

From the sound of things, Apple is focusing a lot of attention on next year’s iPhone launch as the biggest handset refresh since 2014’s iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

Alongside OLED displays, wireless charging, an all-glass enclosure and a lack of physical home button, the iPhone 7s (or possibly iPhone 8 if certain rumors are to be believed) will also include a next-next-gen A11 chip. And Apple’s already working on it.

Apple is seeking an 800,000-square-foot warehouse to work on the Apple Car, according to a West Coast real estate giant, who claims space for developing electric vehicles is currently “a hot demand item” in Silicon Valley.

Upstarts like Apple and Alphabet are apparently competing with traditional automakers to set up shop for next-gen research facilities in the tech mecca.

Apple Music has a not-unimpressive 13 million subscribers right now, but Apple is looking to expand the number of customers willing to spend money on the service by targeting a group that has historically been one of the company’s strongest customer bases: students.

With that in mind, Apple today launched a new Apple Music ‘student’ pricing plan which slashes the per month cost in half ($9.99 down to $4.99 in the United States) for anyone in higher education.

Apple Music has had a pretty rough first year. Despite gaining millions of subscribers and setting download records with some of its more high-profile releases, users still have plenty to stop them from quite clicking on that heart next to the service.

And that’s not just because nobody’s really sure what the hell Apple Music hearts do.

But one man has had such a bad experience that the Apple Support representative he spoke to gave him some advice that was almost certainly not in her training. And he’s shared his story online to warn others away from what has happened to him.

Bidding for Tim Cook’s latest Charity Buzz lunch auction has finally closed, and unless you were willing to part with some huge stacks of money, you had absolutely no chance of winning. 

Cook’s latest auction didn’t shatter his previous record of $610,000 raised for the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights, but it got pretty close.

If you’re still rocking an older iPhone, you might notice that things are starting to feel sluggish when you run the latest iOS 9.3.

If so, there’s a quick trick to speed up your iPhone: simply disable those pretty animations in iOS 9. Your iPhone will feel quite a bit snappier as a result.

Here’s how.

Get some third-party charging cables for cheap, or some in-demand apps for big discounts (or free). We’ll give you the lowdown on those unbeatable bargains — plus a mouthwatering $100 off the iPad mini 4 — in this week’s roundup of the best Apple deals.

Apple is teaming up with SAP to “revolutionize” mobile working for enterprise customers.

The partnership will see native apps for iPhone and iPad combined with the SAP HANA platform, plus a new iOS SDK and training academy that will help developers build new apps tailored to their business needs.

The usernames and passwords for over 270 million hacked email accounts are being traded on Russia’s black market.

One security expert warns that while most of them are Mail.ru accounts for Russia’s most popular email service, tens of millions of them belong to Gmail, Microsoft, and Yahoo Mail users.

Glowing reviews for the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge have been translated into stellar sales for Samsung.

The South Korean company’s latest handsets have been so successful this year that they’ve helped it overtake Apple to become number one smartphone maker in the U.S.

The developers behind Lumi News, both a curation service and new mobile app, want to change the way you get your news. Instead of asking you to pick topics for your news from a long list, like Apple News or Flipboard does, Lumi uses the magic of background algorithms to offer you news stories that actually match your news reading habits.

The service uses Twitter and Facebook to discover your browsing preferences and then presents you with news stories, one at a time, asking you to swipe left (no) or right (yes) like a dating app to help refine what it sends to you. It’s like Tinder for news hounds.

I’ve been smashing aliens with multiple eyes for a good while now, and the fantastic indie-flavored soundtrack of Loud on Planet X has invaded my brain.

A mashup of rhythm games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero with lane-based tower defense games like Plants vs. Zombies, Loud on Planet X will scratch that music game itch, getting you to tap your way to victory while getting to play as your favorite indie band, like Tegan and Sara, CHVRCHES, Lights, Purity Ring, and Little Dragon, just to name a few.

Apple’s big bet on Drake is paying off huge for both sides and shattering records in the process.

Drake’s new album Views is only available on Apple Music, but it’s already been streamed over 250 million times in its first week and his album sales are on pace to be the biggest release by a male artist since Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience.

The boring beige computers Apple offered all the way up until the late ’90s would never get Jony Ive’s stamp of approval today. But fortunately for those who love retro, Apple’s latest iMac is now available with a beige paint job (and a bigger price tag).

How far would you travel to see a collection of rare Apple devices, or the clothes Steve Jobs’ wore when introducing the iPad to the world?

Hopefully, the Czech Republic is not too far for you.

The newly opened Apple Museum in Prague is home to products and memorabilia from eight different private collectors. Its inventory might make the visitor think he’s strolling through some corporate archive in Cupertino.

We can customize our iMac desktops with a favorite photo. Why not the desk itself?

Evodesk, in addition to getting us to stand up for our work, now offers graphic inspiration with a durable second skin that envelops the desk with a wide selection of photos and patterns to keep creatives happy and productive.

If you’re working toward app-making mastery, you need to stay on top of the key languages and frameworks for iOS. For first-time coders and seasoned developers alike, we’ve got three kick-ass courses offering hands-on experience with Xcode, Swift and Objective-C, plus other fundamentals that will hone your chops and up your marketability.

Oh, and another thing — each of these courses is discounted by at least 90 percent.

After throttling our video quality automatically to ensure we didn’t burn through our data in two episodes of Breaking Bad, Netflix is finally giving users control over the video quality they get when using a data connection.

The latest version of its iOS app adds four playback options — plus handy 3D Touch shortcuts that make it faster to access content from the home screen.

It’s not just you. Finding major apps in the App Store has become practically impossible this morning for iPhone and iPad users, according to numerous reports on Twitter.

Apple has acknowledged that there is currently an problem with the App Store for all users. The glitch replaces search results for apps like Twitter, Instagram and Spotify with third-party apps from the same category.

Apple is by far Cupertino’s biggest and most recognizable employer, but the city’s new mayor has accused the tech giant of not pulling its weight when it comes to taxes.

Mayor Barry Chang, who’s only been on the job since December, is wasting no time in pursuit of his mission to get Apple to pay more taxes. He’s slated the local council for apparently cozying up to Apple, and even gotten himself booted out of Apple’s HQ on one occasion after turning up uninvited.

Apple has added a new section to its online store where shoppers can find a range of accessibility gadgets. It is split up into vision, physical and motor skills, and learning and literacy categories, and features products for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

Liam, Apple’s robot that deconstructs iPhones to mine the valuable resources inside them, is certainly cool — but he’s still not the recycling machine we deserve (or need).

Just like any Apple product, Liam was designed to work well. But how much good does the robot, which took three years to develop and build, actually do?

I find myself using the text to speech function on Mac OS X far too much. Having my Mac read articles and emails out loud to me allows me to multitask and do other things — like edit awesome videos for Cult of Mac — without ignoring important messages.

But did you know you can even save those text to speech recording for listening at a later time?

In this week’s Quick Tips video, I’m going to show you how to turn text into a spoken track and save it into iTunes, allowing you to find save your favourite articles and listen to on your iPhone.

Siri has been gradually getting better since its debut in 2011, but some of its original creators are set to introduce its successor, Viv, next week — and, by all accounts, Siri better watch her back!

Having operated in stealth mode for more than a year, Viv’s arrival hopes to represent a significant step forward in artificial intelligence as AI assistants take on more of an active role in running our lives.

Apple’s next acquisition? It would be great to think so.