Fan films are the ultimate way for devotees to pay tribute to the characters they love. They give fans the chance to show how the beloved heroes (and antiheroes) should be portrayed — without the creativity-sapping “benefit” of focus groups, hack screenwriters and overpaid producers.

With a war raging between the fans who make these productions and the rights-holders who argue they’re being damaged, Cult of Mac runs down six of the best fan-created short films doing the round on the interwebz.

Check out our picks below.

Every wearable maker out there right now is trying to figure out how they’re going to compete with the Apple Watch once it lands. Leave it to adult website Pornhub to actually figure it out: It’s just unveiled a tongue-in-cheek concept for a wearable band that would allow you to charge your other gadgets using the power of masturbation.

Apple could launch its eagerly anticipated 12-inch MacBook Air around the time of the Worldwide Developers Conference this June.

Claiming to have spoken with unnamed sources, The Wall Street Journal writes that Apple will release its first refresh of the MacBook Air since April 2014 “in large quantities” during the second quarter of 2015, although no definite date has been nailed down. Suppliers are reportedly already manufacturing the notebook, and are building up supplies ready for shipping.

Apple’s customer service is tops. Go into any Apple Store, and a Genius will be happy to assist you with even the most trivial of technical support problems.

I bet the guy on the other end of a call from an alleged Microsoft tech support guru wished he was talking to an Apple Genius instead. The “support” guy turned out to be a scammer, and when the victim called him out on it, the fake Microsoft agent actually threatened to murder him.

SAN FRANCISCO — After his best friend deemed it impossible to make a fun game using the oversaturated staples of mobile gaming — match three, tower defense and zombies — indie developer Jake Sones made a bet.

Now Sones and his three-person team at Shovelware Games are ready to win that bet with upcoming game Zombie Match Defense, which makes players defend a row of scientists against an attacking horde of zombies by matching three or more brains of the same type. It’s as if Plants vs. Zombies and Candy Crush had a goofy baby and invaded your iPad.

What do you do as a second act after creating one of the most beautiful iOS games in history? If you’re Ustwo, the devs behind the Cult of Mac favorite Monument Valley, the answer is simple: you redesign the car dashboard.

Yes, you read that correctly.

It might be a long way from the M.C. Escher-inspired iPad puzzle game, but Ustwo has teamed up with the company Car Design Research to create a prototype for a simplified in-car display that shows only the information you need at the time you need it. And, unsurprisingly, it looks spectacular.

Two bits of news have emerged for anyone excited about Apple’s upcoming 12-inch-plus iPad Pro. Sources from the Chinese supply chain suggest the tablet will come equipped with Oxide LCD display technology, while a separate report from The Wall Street Journal (paywall) claims Apple is considering adding USB 3.0 ports (among others) to the devices.

What is unanimously agreed upon is that we are unlikely to see the plus-size iPad until the second half of the year, with a Digitimes report suggesting it may not even go into mass production until the third quarter of 2015.

If the rumors are anything to go by, it’ll be worth waiting for, though.

SAN FRANCISCO — Crossy Road developers Andy Sum and Matt Hall never set out to rake in a pile of cash. They did, however, want to create a popular game.

“We wanted to make the next Flappy Bird,” said Sum at the duo’s Game Developers Conference session here Tuesday.

“But our goal wasn’t to make money,” added Hall.

And yet make money they did. While Crossy Road hasn’t hit Flappy Bird levels of success (or notoriety), it pulled in 50 million downloads — on iOS, Android and Amazon — during the game’s first 90 days. It also generated $10 million for Hipster Whale, Sum and Hall’s development company.

Not bad for a game that was originally named Roadkill Simulator 2014.

Apple really is making a giant iPad Pro, according to a new report from Bloomberg, but the Cupertino-based company is running into production issues that have delayed the long-rumored tablet’s release.

According to Bloomberg’s sources, production of the 12.9-inch iPad is now scheduled to start around September, after delays involving the supply of display panels pushed the project back.

Apple snuck a major new emoji feature into its first iOS 8.3 beta, and we’re not talking about the racially diverse kind. Along with the new skin-tones for emoji added last week, Apple has included a potentially big feature with the new emoji keyboard that lets users deconstruct some emoji to discover their emoji combos.

By tapping backspace on emoji like KISS (man, man), users can reveal the combination of two or three emoji that represent the original emoji selected. The feature only works on some of the kissing and couple emoji, but it could be expanded to include more in the future.

Here are the different combos you can unlock:

HBO is finally going to let people pay to access its content without a cable subscription, and according to a new report, Apple TV could be the company’s first major partner.

The International Business Times reports that HBO is in talks with Apple to make Apple TV one of the launch partners for its highly anticipated streaming service that is expected to debut next month alongside Game of Thrones Season 5.

Screenshots of what appears to be the spec sheet of a next-generation 13-inch MacBook Air were allegedly posted on the Chinese forum site Feng.com today, claiming to reveal new info about Apple’s new notebook lineup.

The MacBook Air hasn’t received an update since April 2014, but according to the screenshots, a hardware update could be imminent. The pictures suggest that the update won’t include a Retina display, but new processors and upgraded RAM are supposedly on the way.

Take a peek at the screenshots below:

There’s plenty of carnage and goofy talk about artificial intelligence in the new for Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer. But, just like any Marvel Studios movie, you’ll want to stay till the end: That’s when you’ll get your first peek at The Vision, the android that eventually becomes an Avenger.

We’re just days away from finding out all the juicy details of the Apple Watch, but preparations are already underway at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

Apple’s crew began working on the event decorations this morning by adding a giant Apple logo graphic to front of Yerba Buena. It’s still a work in progress, but it looks like Apple is using the same graphic from the event invites that went out last week. Along with the Apple signage, a giant white tent has also been constructed nearby, presumably as a press hands-on area for after the event.

Apple is making revolutionary breakthroughs in emoji technology with racially diverse emoji in iOS 8.3. For their next innovative addition, wouldn’t it be great if multiple emoji could be joined together as a single icon?

Designers Alexa Grafera and Louie Mantia teamed up to create a delicious new style of emoji called ligatures. The duo made a special set of ice cream fixins emoji that can be strung together to make the tasty-looking desserts found in Alexa’s ice cream emoji GIF above.

Sometime this month, a plane will lift off from an airstrip in the United Arab Emirates and attempt to fly around the world fueled only by rays of the sun.

How technology will keep the plane airborne, or how two pilots — taking turns during five- and six-day flights — will endure a tiny cockpit, extreme temperatures and very little sleep, have kept the company Solar Impulse busy for 12 years. Aviation history could soon be made.

Yet all anyone wants to know is how the pilots will go to the bathroom.

Apple will reveal pricing details on its long-anticipated smartwatch in less than a week, but if the stainless steel version costs upward of $700, I’m definitely going the cheap route with the Apple Watch Sport.

The $350 timepiece isn’t as fashionable as its expensive gold and stainless-steel siblings, a point Apple’s website emphasizes by only showing Sport units with Sport bands. But if you pair the Sport with pricier bands, you can barely tells its the el cheapo option.

iOS developer Nick McCardel created mockups of the Apple Watch Sport with bands for the Apple Watch and Apple Watch Edition. Despite its less luxe finish, the Sport’s silver and space gray aluminum cases still look great no matter what you pair them with.

Take a look at some of the configurations below:

According to sources, the mobile gaming industry accounted for more than $20 billion dollars in revenue globally in 2014 alone. That number is expected to rise dramatically in 2015 and beyond, making some game developers overnight successes.

There’s gold in them there video game hills. Want to claim your stake? With the Unity3D Game Developer Course Bundle available at Cult of Mac Deals right now, you’ll get the knowledge you need to build the next big thing in mobile gaming.

Another day, another award for Apple. This time, branding site Brandchannel has given Apple the nod in its 2015 Brandcameo Product Placement Awards for overall product placement in movies.

After three years without being the most represented company on-screen in Hollywood movies, Apple once again topped the list: appearing in 9 of the 35 movies which scored big at the U.S. weekend box office at some point in the last year, representing one quarter of all #1s.

Anyone want to argue causation over correlation?

Just look at this team. Their faces read, “Close the deal, you won’t regret it.”

A good stock photo makes you believe, a bad one makes you laugh. But when you recognize the team leader is Vince Vaughn, his smoldering confidence projects that good laughs lie ahead.

To promote his upcoming comedy Unfinished Business, 20th Century Fox used iStock by Getty Images to create a series of stock photos, featuring Vaughn and co-stars Dave Franco and Tom Wilkinson, to promote the film. Unlike the bad stock photos that cost money, these are available for editorial use for free.

Android-powered games consoles are almost always a big disappointment, but gaming giant NVIDIA is confident it can change that with the Shield console, a $199 set-top box that’s determined to bring you better games.

I finally pitched the cheap plastic desk lamp I’ve had since high school and replaced it with the light I’ve always wanted: the iconic Anglepoise 1227.

If you’re looking for a classic desk lamp that won’t fade into the backdrop next to your sleek iMac, this is the one for you.

Launched in 1934, the design of the 1227 has changed astonishingly little. It still looks functional and modern, which makes perfect sense given Anglepoise started out making hard-wearing lamps for factory workers.

It’s easy to see how Samsung ripped off the iPhone with the Galaxy S6’s hardware. The metallic frame with chamfered edges, antenna bands, and very familiar port positioning is blatantly taken from the iPhone 6.

But Samsung hasn’t just copied the way the iPhone looks physically. It’s also replicated elements of iOS in a way that’s so evident it’s embarrassing.

Accusations that iOS 8 is slower than Apple’s previous mobile operating systems have circulated since the software debuted in 2014. Although it works great most of the time on my iPhone 6 Plus, you don’t have to look far to find people complaining that the latest version of iOS slows down to a sluggish crawl.

From hard resets to turning on the “reduce motion” option under Accessibility, numerous solutions can be employed to keep iOS 8 running at a good clip. One explanation for iOS 8 feeling slower than its predecessors, however, is that (much like iOS 7) its system animations take too long to complete, thereby making the interface feel slower than it should.

So peeved is Omni developer William Van Hecke that he recently compared the animation speeds in a YouTube video. Chalk it up to unnecessary nitpicking if you want, but when you see iOS 3 reacting considerably quicker than iOS 8, it definitely makes you think Apple could make improvements.

Check out the video below:

Salavat Fidai is working proof that artists need not create large pieces to make a name for themselves.

Much of what he creates is no bigger than the tip of a pencil — literally.

Under the glow of a single work light while his family sleeps, Fidai uses a craft knife and 4x magnifying glass to create tiny sculptures out of pointy pencil lead.