Ever since Apple replaced Google Maps with its own solution there have been rumors that Google Search might be next on the chopping block. Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer has called the Safari search deal one of the premiere search deals in the world, and that her company would be more than happy to take over.

Google’s VP of products, Sundar Pichai, doesn’t sound worried about Google losing its spot anytime soon though. In an interview with Forbes, Pichai touched on his company’s complicated search relationship with Apple, saying the best way to avoid getting sidelined is to keep adding innovative features.

Did you get in trouble when you were a kid because you took your parents’ VCR apart just to see how it worked? If you’ve ever displayed even a casual interest in electronics and a curiosity to learn about how they work, then today’s deal is for you.

For a limited time, Cult of Mac Deals is offering an 81% discount on the Arduino Beginner Course, to quench that thirst for electronics knowledge.

Mark your calendars: Full details of the Apple Watch will be revealed March 9.

Invites were sent to the press today for a special Apple event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on that date. The only hint on the invite are two words: “Spring forward.”

Wardrobe malfunctions can happen with every style of clothing. It’s just a little terrifying when it happens to an astronaut on a spacewalk.

NASA astronaut Terry Virts reported a floating blob of water inside his helmet Wednesday after completing a six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk to perform cable and lube work outside the International Space Station.

America’s oldest surviving robot no longer smokes cigarettes.

Long lines of people no longer wait to see him, topless women haven’t danced around him in years and his legs have been broken since that amusement park gig.

But Elektro is home now, his head reunited with his body, cared for by a man named Scott Schaut, who is so fiercely protective that museum requests to borrow the gold robot usually end with him replying “over my dead body.”

Chances are that the majority of people reading this won’t be looking for a way to make the Apple Watch more expensive.

With a rumored price in excess of $10,000 for the 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition, most of us would have to take out a second mortgage on our house before we could dream of picking up the watches on the higher end of Apple’s wearable collection.

For some individuals, however, solid gold just isn’t enough — which is why luxury design company Brikk today announced its plans to increase the decadence by offering diamond-encrusted Apple Watches for sale. Somewhere, you just know that Kanye West is picking up his blinged-out iPhone 6 Plus and getting ready to make an order!

Everyone loves action figures, right?

With the rarer offerings regularly carrying price tags that put them out of reach for most allowances, however, they’re no longer exclusively for kids. With that in mind, here’s Cult of Mac’s list of the must-have figures with price tags to match. Featuring everything from pro wrestlers to sci-fi characters, we’re sure you’ll find something to tempt you.

Play nicely, now!

The iPad might be the king of tablets when it comes to quality, but it is no longer the king when it comes to sales.

A new report from research firm Strategy Analytics says that the iPad is now being outsold by so-called Brand X tablets: generic tablets sold under any brand name that isn’t Apple or Samsung.

It’s not often that Google incontrovertibly one-ups Apple on anything but search, but the company just scored a small but sizable advantage over Cupertino in at least one regard: music storage space.

Google expanded its Google Play Music service Wednesday to match, store and stream 50,000 tracks, twice what Apple allows iTunes Match paid users. Even better for listeners with large libraries? Google Play Music is free.

For a long time, Apple Maps was a laughing stock. Then it started getting better. Apple ironed out the glitches, began updating Apple Maps every day, and introduced Flyover, which gave you a 3-D view of major cities as they would look from the sky.

Now it’s taken that technology one step further in an effort to win the mapping war versus Google: Apple Maps is going real-time.

Thanks to a new update, London’s Big Ben clock tower will now show the real time, while the iconic London Eye will rotate. Those are the only real-time updates we’ve spotted so far, but Apple is reportedly looking to add more moving elements to cities over the following year.

On the consumer side, Apple couldn’t be hotter in China: not only taking the top spot for smartphone sales in the country for the first time ever, but also beating out the likes of Gucci and Chanel to be named China’s favorite luxury brand.

It is on the more official side of the equation where Apple is struggling, however. In what commentators are calling a response to widespread Western cyber-surveillance, the Chinese government has dropped Apple products from its list of approved state purchases.

On May 17, Tim Cook will be giving the commencement address to the 2015 graduating class of George Washington University. He will also be awarded a honorary doctorate of public service.

It will be the Apple CEO’s second time giving such a speech after addressing his alma mater Auburn University in 2010.

Samsung is expected to unveil its new flagship Galaxy S6 smartphone at Mobile World Congress next month, but some leaked images from the XDA developer forums might have just spoiled their big reveal.

The set of images of an alleged Samsung prototype show is a big departure from the other Galaxy devices with rounded edges that make it look more like the iPhone 6. The bottom of the leaked Galaxy S6 looks almost identical to the iPhone 6 bottom.

Here’s the bottom of the iPhone 6 for comparison:

Tim Cook is currently visiting Israel in conjunction with Apple opening a new office in Herzliya. As part of the trip, he met with the president of Israel, Reuven Rivlin.

The two leaders showed great respect for each other during a chat at the president’s residence. Along with recognizing an Israeli Apple VP in attendance with Cook, Rivlin thanked the Apple CEO repeatedly for “what you are doing for all humanity.” Cook talked about Apple’s love for Israel as an “ally for the U.S.” and a “place to do business.” Cook also praised Rivlin’s work to “bridge the gap” between nationalities and religions in the Middle East.

Ben Marcus attracts attention whenever he flies his quadcopter and sometimes he lets the curious take the controls.

During those exchanges, many say this: That’s cool, but what about the privacy issues?

Marcus sensed that the concern about camera-outfitted drones unknowingly hovering over our lives was real enough that it could stunt the potential applications of drones.

So he started a company that will let people restrict their own air space.

NoFlyZone launched on Feb. 10 and already has more than 20,000 homeowners signed up to request drone pilots steer clear of their property.

If you plan on seeing Focus starring Will Smith and Margot Robbie this weekend, you will be watching the first major studio film edited entirely with Final Cut Pro X.

Originally criticized as “iMovie Pro” for its incredibly simplistic interface and feature set, Final Cut Pro X has managed to start wooing Hollywood filmmakers by slowly adding back missed tools along with new ones. Now the directors behind Focus think it’s the future of movie editing.

Photographer and book publisher Rick Smolan was 25 when he made the best picture of his young career while on assignment in Australia. It was a group of aboriginal children playing in golden light with a balloon on a red dirt runway.

But when he looked down at his camera, he realized the shot would be grossly underexposed. Sure enough, when the Kodachrome 25 slides came back, the frame was dark and murky.

“I stuck the slide in a safe deposit box because I knew someday someone would invent something to save that picture,” Smolan, who created the Day in the Life photo book series and America 24/7, told Cult of Mac.

We’re still waiting for the final pricing details on the Apple Watch, but if recent reports that Apple plans to sell one million gold Edition units a month are true, Apple Watch could wreak havoc on gold prices and do who knows what to the global economy.

Josh Center at TidBits has done some math on Apple Watch and estimates that if production rumors are correct, Apple will be bidding for a third of the world’s annual gold supply to make enough gold watches to meet demand.

To put those numbers in perspective, Apple needs so much gold it could turn the all 7,000 metric tons of gold stored at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — you know, the one from the plot of Die Hard 3 — into gold watches in less than a decade.

Get ready to watch the epic slow burn in the official trailer for the upcoming conclusion to Rocksteady’s Arkham video game series, Batman: Arkham Knight. Scarecrow is uniting all of Batman’s enemies — Penguin, Two-Face, the Riddler, Harley Quinn, Poison, Ivy, and the Arkham Knight — to take Gotham City and take down The Bat.

Sure, there’s a little bit of Bane-like incomprehensibility in the Scarecrow’s voice-over, and (barring a miracle) the Joker won’t be in town this time around, but this game is looking pretty amazing. The in-game shots of Batman plunging down the skyscrapers of Gotham City, the brutal combat animations, and the just plain high-resolution glory of the fictional city and it’s lone hero make us want to play Batman: Arkham Knight right now.

Check out the epic trailer for the June 2, 2015 game below.

Apple can be an incredibly demanding company to work for, but just getting in the door is nearly impossible.

The hiring process for Apple retail is fairly lengthy, but according to UX designer Luis Abreu, landing a job at the mothership in Cupertino is an even longer, more grueling process — which he just suffered through firsthand.

Apple Watch still isn’t available for the masses, but Apple is ramping up its marketing efforts among fashionistas with a multipage spread in the March issue of Vogue.

Multiple versions of the Apple Watch are shown across the seven-page ad, which includes closeups of the watch bands as well as full-size pictures of the entire device to give readers a better idea about whether Jony Ive’s timepiece will fit in with their wardrobes.

Take a look at some of the other ads below:

Despite angering iOS users by forcing their album, Songs of Innocence, onto every iPhone and iPad in the world, U2’s iTunes exclusivity bet is paying off big time.

Nearly one in four of all music users on iOS devices listened to U2 in January, which was nearly double the second most popular artist, Taylor Swift. The force-fed album debuted last fall but its impact is still visible five months later, according to Kantar’s latest survey of iOS users, which found that 23% of all music users on iOS listened to at least one U2 track in January.

Here’s the top 10 artists in January:

Quadcopters are a lot of fun, especially when they come equipped with a high definition camera. They allow you to take professional looking video and offer a unique vantage point with which to view your surroundings.

Now you can get a quadcopter that has those exact characteristics with Cult of Mac Deals’ limited edition Code Black Drone with HD Camera. Pre-order yours now for only $89 with free US shipping. Hurry, this is your last chance to pre-order at this pricepoint.

The Apple Watch reveal back in September was big on excitement, but short on details. Among those things that Apple failed to mention was whether or not Cupertino’s new smartwatch will be able to withstand liquids — making it suitable for, say, swimming or washing the dishes.

While we still don’t have a final, definitive answer on what is and is not advisable with the Apple Watch, Tim Cook shed a bit of light on the mystery during a Q&A session with staff at the Kurfürstendamm Apple Store in Berlin, Germany, where he is currently visiting. Cook said that that he wears his Apple Watch “even in the shower.”

From minor controversies like Antennagate to being kicked out of his own company and then returning triumphantly, Steve Jobs got out of plenty of tight squeezes in his life.

Now that he’s gone, it seems that that same spirit of near-misses and daring triumphs is left to Venus, Jobs’ 256-foot, $120 million super-yacht.

Having visited Montenegro, Palma, Gibraltar, Horta Azores and many other exotic locations since Jobs’ death in 2011, the yacht recently had a close call while passing through a bridge in Saint Martin, an island in the northeast Caribbean, approximately 185 miles east of Puerto Rico.

Check out the video after the jump.