Apple started selling its brand new official Lightning connector dock earlier this year. While it turned out to be a bit less fragile in reality than it looks on first glance, we can’t help but wish Apple had released the Lightning dock shown in a newly-published patent today.

Designed for durability, Apple’s concept connect features a movable Lightning connector that is able to rock back and forth, thereby absorbing what Apple calls “undesirable forces … reducing a likelihood of the connector breaking from misuse.”

It’s such an elegant solution we can’t help wonder — why didn’t Apple use it?

There’s just no getting around it: FBI director James Comey isn’t a fan of encryption.

In an open letter, Comey writes that the kind of security seen on devices like the iPhone do more to hurt us than they do to help — potentially even aiding terrorist groups such as ISIS.

“I really am not a maniac (or at least my family says so),” he claims. “But my job is to try to keep people safe. In universal strong encryption, I see something that is with us already and growing every day that will inexorably affect my ability to do that job.”

If there’s one area Samsung would dearly love to copy Apple it’s not smartwatches or tablets or store design or even smartphones — but profits.

Despite protesting earlier reports that the Galaxy S6 was proving to be a gigantic sales disaster for the stumbling South Korean tech giant, Samsung’s forecast operating profits released today show not only 8.4 percent fewer sales and a 4 percent earnings decrease from this time last year, but the company’s 7th consecutive quarterly earnings decrease in a row.

Someone’s in a Galaxy of trouble right now!

Apple may have banned selfie sticks at WWDC, but the company was today granted a patent revealing how future iPhones could be unlocked by snapping a quick photo of yourself.

Entitled “Low threshold face recognition,” the patent describes a means of “reducing the impact of lighting conditions and biometric distortions” that can negatively affect facial recognition for a solution which “can be implemented on camera-equipped consumer portable appliances” — presumably such as the iPhone and iPad, although the second-generation (camera-equipped) Apple Watch 2 wouldn’t be out of the question, either.

Smug Californians now have proof they’re better than you.

A couple of the most popular fitness apps in the App Store have pooled their data to figure out which U.S. states have the best (and worst) health habits. They examined a combination of workout and nutritional info among their users and concluded that the Golden State has the best habits, and Wyoming has a lot of work to do.

I typically look for two things in a hotel room: Internet included with the room and free breakfast. But a new hotel in London’s Covent Gardens might have me adding some things to that list.

The recently opened Hub hotel from Premier Inn, the U.K.’s largest lodging chain, sports some pretty impressive tech features that involve both smartphones and wearables like the Apple Watch. And while your hotel room shouldn’t be the coolest part of any trip, Premier is really giving the rest of your vacation something to live up to.

If you’ve got the future strapped to your wrist and an iPhone paired with said Apple Watch, you can prank your friends with the lowest form of humor imaginable: the fart sound.

You’ll also need Apple Music, as this trick relies on the sound effect albums therein.

Here’s how to fart at your friends without actually soiling your own shorts.

Minecraft has always let you tell your own story with it’s open-world sandbox game. You can dig, build, fight zombies, and even explore amazing worlds built by other Minecraft fans and find your own way to play.

Now, though, Telltale wants you to immerse yourself in a new authored story that will be released episodically. Titled Minecraft: Story Mode, the upcoming game features a ton of famous voice-over actors to bring the story to life.

Take a listen to the trailer below and see if you can at least figure out who the main character, Jesse, is.

The Apple Watch may not be available in New Zealand yet, but that isn’t stopping some safety-minded organizations from seeking to ban it, and other smartwatches, from use while driving.

“A second’s inattention at the wheel can result in tragedy,” said advocate Caroline Perry of road-safety charity Brake. “Smartwatches and other wearable technology are extremely distracting if used while driving.”

Apple Music is at heart a streaming solution, designed so that you can listen to any of the tens of millions of songs in its library at any time, assuming you have a data connection.

These days, though, unlimited data plans are the exception rather than the rule, so you might want to be a little less profligate with your use of such a data-heavy solution.

Apple Music allows you to save your songs, albums and playlists to your iPhone or Mac for offline listening, which could be a boon if you’re watching your data cap.

Here’s how to make that happen.

If you’ve ever tried to plan a trip using one of the big two digital mapping systems from Apple or Google, you know what a pain it can be to flip back and forth between the different parts of your excursion. A multi-destination walk becomes an exercise in frustration when you add in searching for food, entertainment, and the like in one app.

Microsoft’s Bing has got your back with a redesign of its own navigation system, Bing Maps. This new upgrade will let you search for directions, find locations you need, and offer access to sites like Trip Advisor and Yelp, all on the map itself.

“We heard that people want one experience that brings together the best content in one view, that fully reflects what they are planning, not just their last search,” writes the Bing team on their blog. “Users want a map experience that is fast and easy to use, and makes the most of the visually rich data that maps can bring to life.”

This is not an Onion article, though you may have been fooled into thinking that given the preposterous headline.

NBA forward Matt Bonner has won two championship rings with the San Antonio Spurs, but after suffering his worst shooting percentage since his rookie season, the 35-year old his placing all the blame on Apple.

In a recent interview the basketball player revealed that he believes the iPhone 6’s larger screen contributed to his poor shooting performance, and gave him a season-ending injury in the form of a serious case of tennis elbow.

Microsoft has been killing it on iOS with its lineup of premium productivity apps. Now the company is trying to make organizing group outings a lot more fun with is new app Tossup from the Microsoft Garage.

Out today on both iOS and Android, Tossup allows large groups of friends and family to make decisions on things like where to eat, what movie to see, or who should be invited.

Here’s a demo of how it works:

The Apple Watch isn’t completely waterproof, so it makes sense that you won’t find a swimming option in the Workouts app. But that hasn’t stopped one development team from building their own way to track aquatic exercises on the wearable.

Active in Time has ported its own Pebble swimming app over to Apple’s smartwatch, and it tested its functionality (and the Apple Watch’s water resistance) with four lengths in an Olympic swimming pool. You can see the results in the video below.

My biggest gripe with Instagram is the app takes my big beautiful pictures and compresses them down to a low 640×640 resolution. It looks like the company is preparing to change that in near future though, by now storing images in a higher 1080 x 1080 size.

Amazon is getting more serious about taking a piece of the cloud storage action. Over the holiday weekend, the company released its Amazon Cloud Drive app for iOS, letting you finally access your files in Amazon’s cloud from your iPhone or iPad.

The app competes with the likes of Dropbox by enabling you to view your files anywhere, but falls short in a number of key areas.

Whether you’ve got them jotted down on a yellow notepad, in a document file, or scrawled on a stack of napkins hidden in your mattress, you’ve got to have a way keeping your passwords, financial info and other sensitive data secure and accessible when it’s needed. SplashID Pro’s Lifetime Plan gathers all those errant bits of info, puts them in one place, locks them up and hands you the only key.

Every summer Oreo comes out with a crazy new limited edition cookie to get you to stuff your face with more delicious cream filling. This year’s no different except instead of using watermelon, birthday cake, or lemon creme filling to tempt you, the company has taken a bite out of Apple’s playbook by making the Oreo impossibly thin.

Recording a rap album is tough, expensive work. Sure, you can bust out a crappy demo on computer if you can’t afford studio sessions, but when Brooklyn rapper Prince Harvey’s laptop got stolen, he found the next best thing to busting out beats at the library: The Apple Store in SoHo.

Apple tends to focus on internal components rather than external changes when it comes to its incremental “s” releases.

However according to a new leaked schematic, this year the company might think a bit different — with a slightly redesigned iPhone body that, surprisingly enough, could turn out to be marginally thicker than last year’s model.

Apple is predicting big things for its next-generation iPhone 6s — and for Apple’s manufacturers, big orders means hiring a big workforce to deal with it.

A new report today claims that Protek, a Pegatron subsidiary based in eastern China, is hiring 40,000 additional workers to cope with the iPhone 6s manufacturing it’s scheduled to start work on next month.

With just two full months to go until the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus are officially unveiled, a Chinese gadget blog has allegedly revealed the launch dates of both the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus — courtesy of sources inside the Foxconn supply chain.

The Chinese iPhone market is exploding, but perhaps a bit too literally for one Hong Kong woman, who claims that her 128GB iPhone 6 Plus exploded while being charged — not only separating the screen from the handset, but significantly melting the back cover.

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