Mainland China is Apple’s second biggest market, and will one day be its first. The company is making a big push on the mainland, opening new stores and investing in home-grown companies. Why the interest? Because China is the new Japan — it’s where the future is happening. All this week we take a look at the cutting-edge apps that define mobile life on the mainland.

SHANGHAI CITY, China — “Where are we going to eat? Have you DianPing-ed it yet?” These are questions my friends and I often ask each other when we get together. This convenient app, backed by internet powerhouse Tencent Holdings, is a great tool that combines the functions of Groupon and Yelp.

Apple’s new Thunderbolt Display will ship with a built-in GPU that will provide entry-level and older Macs with enough power to drive its super sharp 5K resolution, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans.

Facebook is finally giving its Messenger emoji characters a much-needed overhaul.

Starting today, users will see all-new emoji designs with support for skin tone selection inside the official Messenger apps on all platforms.

Apple is confident the iPhone will bounce back from its current slump in demand, but new forecasts suggest shipments will get worse before they get better. Researchers don’t expect growth to return until 2017 when Apple introduces bigger upgrades.

Move over Hermes. There’s a new high-end fashion brand that is ready to capitalize on the Apple Watch and its leather bands will be launching soon.

Coach has secretly listed its first Apple Watch bands on its website. An official unveiling of the luxury leather bands is still in the works, but based on the early listings it appears that the bands will come at a relatively cheap price point.

Apple has begun inviting members of the press to its WWDC 2016 keynote on June 13.

The event kicks off at 10 a.m. PT in the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, and it should deliver our first sneak peeks at iOS 10 and Apple’s next major upgrades for watchOS, tvOS, and OS X.

Parry Gripp was the lead vocalist of a promising pop punk band that had a record deal and stardom just around the corner.

Success never came and just as Parry Gripp was set to give up, a new career in music rose from the ashes — by accident — thanks to the iPhone and Apple.

The technology company was not only fodder for Gripp’s brand of absurd novelty music he was creating but, through iTunes, Apple provided a way for him to publish his music and start to make a living.

Apple has beaten Samsung in the American Customer Satisfaction Index for 2016 — but only just. While both companies scored exactly the same in 2015, Apple managed to grab an extra point to claim first place all for itself this year.

Content creators of all types and stripes use Adobe products, whether they know it or not. From Photoshop, Premiere and Indesign to Flash and Acrobat, Adobe underpins everything from photography and video to web design and digital documents. All of the above is wrapped up in Adobe’s Creative Cloud, and now’s your chance to get access to the whole shebang for a full five years, at no cost.

Enter to win five years of access to this invaluable suite of tools — a $2,999 value! — at Cult of Mac Deals.

Apple’s next-generation iPhones could be its biggest yet — at least as far as storage is concerned.

According to one research firm, both the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus will come in whopping 256GB options, while the latter will also pack more RAM.

Samsung gets a lot of hate for copying Apple’s first iPhones, but boy how the tables could turn in 2017. According to yet another report, the iPhone 8’s new OLED display will be curved on both sides — just like the Galaxy S7 edge’s.

Mainland China is Apple’s second biggest market, and will one day be its first. The company is making a big push on the mainland, opening new stores and investing in home-grown companies. Why the interest? Because China is the new Japan — it’s where the future is happening. All this week we take a look at the cutting-edge apps that define mobile life on the mainland.

SHANGHAI CITY, China — Now that I use WeChat, I don’t need much else when it comes to social media apps. In fact, WeChat has almost entirely replaced text messaging in China. I am able to link up with other WeChat users through their username without providing a telephone number, so it is a great platform for communicating with new acquaintances or people I am working with.

I have hundreds of WeChat contacts, but only a handful of telephone numbers in my iPhone. The app also recently introduced group video messaging and has an extensive WeChat Wallet service (similar to Zhifubao) available to Chinese bank account holders.

Facebook plans to tighten security on its popular Messenger platform this summer, but it won’t be turned on for all users by default.

Messenger will add a new end-to-end encryption feature that prevents hackers and the government from being able to read your text messages. Facebook won’t be able to read your messages either though, and that will seriously hurt its ability to make bots great if you decide to opt-in to better security.

Leaked photos of what is claimed to be Apple’s next-generation MacBook Pro all but confirm it will ship with a new OLED touchpad above its keyboard. The images sent to Cult of Mac also hint at four USB-C connectors.

This post is brought to you by EdX.

It’s often said that the internet makes it possible for anyone to get educated on any subject. But just as in offline modes of education, the many models of online teaching and learning are far from perfect, with plenty of room for improvement and innovation.

A joint effort between Harvard and MIT — dubbed EdX — is aiming to provide not only a place for learning new skills, but a platform for innovating new ways of teaching and learning over the web. It’s a nonprofit online education platform partnered with nearly 100 of the world’s leading universities and institutions — Harvard, MIT, Microsoft, Caltech, Columbia, you get the picture — to provide students anywhere in the world access to more than 1,000 certified courses. As an open-source platform, it also offers educators an opportunity to design and implement their own modes of teaching.

Apple doesn’t have gamers in mind when choosing components for its latest Macs, but PC maker Digital Storm has proven that it’s possible to build a beastly gaming rig into the iMac’s gorgeous all-in-one form factor.

Check out the company’s stunning new Aura PC, which puts NVIDIA’s latest GTX 1080 graphics card behind a 34-inch curved display.

Have you been waiting for years for Apple to finally update its Thunderbolt Display lineup with a sexy 4K or even 5K screen?

The wait might finally be over.

Construction on Apple’s new campus isn’t expected to be completed until the end of the year, but the spaceship is starting to come into shape in the latest flyover video that shows some buildings have already been completed.

Tim Cook’s beautiful pile of dirt keeps growing in Matthew Roberts’ latest drone footage of the new campus that takes a look at the massive 11,000 vehicle car garage that is nearly finished, as well as a new plaza that’s being constructed near the underground theater entrance.

Watch the action below:

Apple just added another bunch of playlists to Apple Music that will help you discover new music from your favorite genres. They’re called “Breaking,” and they’re filled with over two hours of the hottest tracks.

The super-fast WiFi on your iPhone may be the result of patent violations, according to a new lawsuit filed by the California Institute of Technology that claims Apple violated four of its patents.

The Golden State Warriors completed one of the biggest comebacks in NBA playoff history last night when they beat the Oklahoma City Thunder, and perhaps no one in the arena was as amped as Apple VP Eddy Cue.

You see, Eddy Cue loves basketball. He’s such a big hoops fan that he’s made a habit of getting spotted with some of the game’s biggest stars in the biggest moments. So it should be no surprise that when the Warriors’ local paper announced the team’s win this morning Cue was right on the front page with Steph Curry.

Check it out:

Don’t you just hate having to pack a whole bunch of different cables when you go traveling? Here’s a tiny little adapter that can help by making your Nintendo 3DS compatible with Lightning, allowing you to charge it with your iPhone’s cable.

Data recovery, web design interfaces, a new OS X toolbar — that’s just a handful of the uses you’ll find in this big bundle of top notch apps for Mac. There are a total of 8 productivity enhancing, web building, performance boosting apps in this collection, with something for everybody. And right now you can get the whole thing for $29,99.

There’s no room for a 3.5mm headphone jack in Apple’s next-generation iPhones, according to recent leaks — but that doesn’t mean all your existing headphones are no good.

Accessory makers are already building all kinds of dongles that will make your favorite cans iPhone 7 ready.

Many iPhone fans don’t like waiting two years for major refreshes, but it could be about to get a lot worse. According to one report, Apple is switching its big upgrades to a three-year cycle, which is why this year’s iPhone 7 will look just like its predecessors.