Although he ultimately ran the show at Apple until the middle of 2011, Steve Jobs began thinking about succession plans as early as 2004, when he was just 49 years old, according to a new Fast Company excerpt of the upcoming book Becoming Steve Jobs.

2004 was one year after Jobs had a medical scan which revealed he had a tumor in his pancreas. While it was later revealed to be a rare type of pancreatic tumor which grows slower than usual, at the time Jobs was told that he should expect to live no longer than three to six months. 2004 was, of course, years before Apple unveiled the iPhone and iPad: two of the devices for which Jobs is best remembered.

The book excerpt also reveals that, right up until the very end, Tim Cook was convinced that Steve Jobs had a longer role to play at Apple as chairman.

The war regarding whether Apple did or did not invent the USB-C connector witnessed a pretty decisive development this morning, as Apple was awarded a patent describing a slimline reversible input/output electrical connector for transferring a variety of data types including HDMI, audio, USB and video.

The patent was filed by Apple in the third quarter of 2013, but only published today. It names Eric Jol, Albert Golko, Mathias Schmidt and Jahan Minoo as its inventors: all current Apple employees, with the exception of Schmidt who now works at Nest Labs, founded by former Appler Tony Fadell.

Nintendo has always been adamant it wouldn’t develop games for smartphones and tablets, but it has finally given in.

Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong and other popular franchises could soon be coming to Android and iOS after the Japanese company confirmed it will be developing new titles for smart devices with the help of game developer DeNA.

It’s looking like 2015 will finally be the year that Apple’s dream TV service becomes a reality.

After years of reports that the company has been trying to get its own TV subscription off the ground, June is on track to be the month it’s debuted for the world to see. The service will reportedly offer around 25 channels and cost a little more than the competition.

Apple might have just leaked some packaging for the upcoming Apple Watch.

The Apple Jobs website received a nice update today — including a new image of what appears to be some of the Apple Watch packaging that will hit Apple Store shelves April 24. The boxes look too thin to hold the Apple Watch and its inductive charger, so they’re more likely just for bands, but we couldn’t help but notice they look just like Swatch’s iconic boxes.

Here’s a comparison shot:

If you are broke after buying an iPhone, do yourself a favor and leave it in the box until you can afford a proper cover.

The quickie DIY cover demonstrated in the video below is neither smart nor attractive, but it does demonstrate just how much thought people put into different ways to live with their devices.

The balloon trick, while probably keeping part of the phone protected from rainy weather, renders the camera useless. On the plus side, if you drop your phone from a great distance, the balloon should keep your broken bits together.

A new trailer for the upcoming Jurassic World video game re-creates some of the best moments of the Jurassic Park franchise using everyone’s favorite multicolor bricks.

I’m a massive fan of both Lego and Jurassic Park, so a combination of the two is pretty much guaranteed to hit the sweet spot. If you don’t absolutely lose it when you see Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm make a Lego-size appearance, I don’t know what to tell you, but I think there’s no way we can be friends. Lego incarnations of Richard Attenborough, Sam Neill and Chris Pratt also make an appearance, in addition to the expected plethora of dinos.

Check out the trailer below.

Trading up from an Android to iPhone is about to get a lot easier, as Apple plans to incentivize switchers by offering Apple Store credit to customers who bring in their old non-iOS devices for trade.

Apple plans to expand its iPhone Reuse and Recycling Program to include non-iOS devices, reports Buzzfeed’s John Paczkowski, who says Apple Stores will soon take everything from Blackberry’s to Windows Phone handsets.

One of the most highly anticipated rap albums of 2015 has landed on iTunes a week early.

To Pimp a Butteryfly, the follow-up to Kendrick Lamar’s highly acclaimed album good kid, m.A.A.d city is slated for wide release on March 23rd, but thanks to an error with iTunes pre-order, customers can access the hot new album right now.

This post is brought to you by DearMob Inc., creator of 5KPlayer.

Want to stream your videos and music from your little iOS device to your Mac’s larger screen? 5KPlayer is an AirPlay-enabled HD video player, music player and video downloader that makes multiscreen playback easier than ever.

With this handy media streamer, you can share the contents of your iOS device with family and friends quickly and easily without fumbling for a cable. But that’s not the only media problem this free, all-in-one software will solve.

Passwords are easy to forget. They’re even easier to steal. Now Yahoo has unveiled a new scheme to make permanent passwords as outdated as Morse code.

Yahoo is rolling out its “on-demand” email passwords that utilize phone notifications so you’ll never have to memorize a password again. It works kind of like two-factor authentication, except you don’t ever have to type in your primary password.

Apple has released the fourth beta of OS X 10.10.3 to both developers and the public this morning, less than a week after the company seeded the third beta.

The new beta is pretty much identical to the third beta released last week, but adds a fix for the new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air that prevented it from working with those machines previously.

Designer, artist and feminist Molly McLeod has an iPhone problem. It’s one we probably all share: We spend too much time staring at it. Imagine how much worse it’s going to get when we replace our neurotic iPhone obsession with an Apple Watch.

McLeod created four delightfully playful designs that we could use to remind us (with a healthy dose of irony) to stop staring at our tiny screens for a moment.

“I find myself habitually looking at my phone when I’m commuting or idly waiting for something,” she writes on her website, “so I thought I would make my phone give me this gentle reminder. There are always other interesting things to look at if you look up!”

It’s that time of year when office work comes to a standstill for weeks thanks to the NCAA’s annual celebration of sweat, leather and nylon nets. The brackets have been set and teams are en route to play the 67 basketball games that will take place over the next few weeks, with Kentucky being the undisputed favorite to walk away with a perfect season.

Thanks to the glories of technology, you can follow all the action this year even if you don’t have a cable subscription. With the right combo of apps, you can get expert insight into your favorite Cinderella team, watch every game — and maybe even pick the perfect bracket.

Dominate March Madness this year with these apps for Mac and iOS:

Got an iPhone 6 or smaller? You might be feeling a little cramped for space on your screen due to iOS 8’s new word-prediction system.

That little gray bar that sits just above your iOS keyboard is called the QuickType bar, and it’s where all the auto-correct and typing suggestions appear when you’re sending an email, typing a note or iMessaging with someone. The suggestions are based on your past conversations, which lets QuickType take your writing style into account. It even keeps track of who you’re writing to, since your word choice is typically tied to your conversation partner.

If you want to hide it because you need more space on your screen, you can do so in any of three ways. You can also bring it back if you’ve inadvertently hidden it and don’t know where it went.

There are millions of asteroids in the Solar System and relatively few astronomers to track them. They’d hate to miss that one dangerous rogue headed on a collision course with Earth.

So NASA has made it easier for the amateur stargazer to record and compare their discoveries and put extra eyes on the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

NASA and Planetary Resources Inc. have developed a computer program that is based on an algorithm that analyzes images for potential asteroids. The new asteroid hunting application, available for free download here, was announced Sunday by NASA at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas.

Beats Music is due for a big redesign come WWDC. Hopefully that means a native Mac app is on the way, as well as a web player that doesn’t use Flash.

While we’re waiting for Apple to trash its use of the web plugin Steve Jobs loathed, Chris Aljoudi has solved the problem with a brilliant Safari extension that brings Beats Music playback to your browser using HTML5.

The Ultimate Security Bundle is a web security triple threat: Fight against web threats and hackers using software, third party security services, and training that’ll prepare you to protect yourself for now and into the future.

Now you can get the apps, services, and training to protect yourself now and into the future with the Ultimate Security Bundle, value priced at 79% off for a limited time only at Cult of Mac Deals.

The new Steve Jobs biography, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader, promises plenty of fascinating tidbits about the life of Apple’s co-founder, some of which we’ve revealed here.

But the real thing I’m excited about, that I hope the book does a whole lot better than its predecessor by Walter Isaacson, is answering the question of how exactly Jobs went from being an impulsive, hard-to-work-with co-founder to the cool, collected digital emperor who barely put a foot wrong just over one decade later.

To mark the release of Becoming Steve Jobs, a new Fast Company article written by veteran journalist Rick Tetzeli grapples with that very question. One of Tetzeli’s conclusions? It was all about Pixar.

Alex Gibney’s documentary about Steve Jobs debuted at the South by Southwest film fest in Austin this weekend, and the first reviews have called film a “coolly absorbing, deeply unflattering portrait of the late Silicon Valley entrepreneur.”

Eddy Cue took to Twitter this morning to blast the Oscar-winning director’s film, saying he was “very disappointed in Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine.”

Here’s what Cue had to say about the documentary:

Whether it’s the iPhone 6, the Apple Watch or some other hot piece of tech, battery life is one of the most commonly criticized aspects of today’s devices.

That may be about to change, however, courtesy of a University of Michigan spinoff company called Sakti3, which has developed a new type of solid-state battery capable of storing twice the energy of traditional liquid-based lithium rechargeable batteries.

Considering that the Apple Watch goes on sale in a little over one month, Apple has still provided relatively few details about how exactly it’s going to be selling its upscale wearable devices.

Some images posted by Japanese Apple blog Macotakara offer a few hints, however. The photos show an Apple Watch booth or mini-store at the upmarket Isetan department store in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The sign reads “WATCH: Coming Soon.”

Like a Terminator in a downhill marathon, the runaway sales of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus aren’t slowing down in a hurry.

Analysts expect Apple’s smartphone to trample all competition in its path this quarter, with massive sales of more than 50 million units.

Having spent more than a year throwing smartwatch concepts a wall, only to discover that very few of them stick, Samsung’s taking a bit of a break from the wearables game.

But a newly-unearthed patent suggests that the South Korean tech giant could come back with a vengeance, thanks to a ripoff Apple concept bold new interface design based around an iPod-style rotating bezel. The idea would be that this rotating bezel could allow users to scroll through different apps, lists and menus without having to obscure the miniature display with their finger.

So, yeah, it’s basically the Apple Watch’s digital crown idea — only “different” enough to not be a direct analog.

Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney’s Steve Jobs documentary, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, debuted over the weekend at the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival in Austin, Texas.

Financed by CNN Films, the 127-minute doc was described by its maker as delivering a “far more complex interpretation” of Jobs than any of the previous movies depicting the life of Apple’s iconic co-founder.

But what did the press think? Well, the first reviews are out and, while they’re generally strong, they certainly don’t describe a documentary that paints Jobs in a favorable light — or one that contains too many revelations that will be new to anyone who read Jobs’ maligned 2011 biography by Walter Isaacson.