The Apple Car rumor mill has been heating up today with reports that Apple has been hiring auto talent from companies like Mercedes and BMW. Now the Wall Street Journal is chiming in with its own report that claims Tim Cook approved Apple’s project over a year ago.

Apple reportedly has several hundred employees working on the secret project that’s aiming to create an Apple-branded electric vehicle that can take on Telsa.

Silicon Valley’s top CEOs snubbed President Barack Obama’s appearance at Stanford University today for the White House Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection, but Apple CEO Tim Cook used his invite to make the case for improving security.

Cook addressed attendees before Obama took the stage and reaffirmed Apple’s belief that everyone has a right to privacy and security. In part of his speech, the Apple CEO warned of “dire consequences” if the proper balance between security and privacy isn’t maintained.

“We must get this right!” Cook told the audience.  “History has shown us that sacrificing our right to privacy can have dire consequences.”

Apple wasn’t kidding when it said Apple Pay would transform mobile payments. Built around easy of use and security, Apple Pay is the industry’s first solution that benefits users and banks.

The security aspect of Apple Pay has been especially crucial to its early success, and now the big credit card companies have been spurred to follow suit. Today both Visa and MasterCard announced new security initiatives to protect against cyberattacks. Visa in particular has borrowed one of Apple Pay’s key ideas: tokenization.

Apple Pay has already become the top mobile wallet at a number of stores, but now Apple’s about to take on the great outdoors.

During his address at today’s White House cybersecurity summit, Tim Cook said that starting in September you’ll be able to use Apple Pay for transactions with the federal government, including paying fees to get into Yosemite and the other national parks.

Cook’s visit to the summit was a big win for Apple Pay, which Cook says is now supported by more than 2,000 banks, putting us one step closer to the age when your wallet will be a thing of the past. The White House has given Apple Pay its stamp of approval, too, and announced plans to enable it on all federal-payment cards.

Apple has set up a top-secret automobile R&D lab and is recruiting experts to possibly build a car, the Financial Times reports.

The lab is in a secret location away from Apple’s HQ. Apple recently hired the head of Mercedes-Benz’s Silicon Valley R&D unit, and has staffed the new lab with “experienced managers from its iPhone unit,” the Times says.

“Three months ago I would have said it was CarPlay,” said one of FT‘s sources. “Today I think it’s a car.”

Tim Cook and President Obama are attending today’s White House Cyber Security Summit to talk about a range of issues facing the U.S. tech industry.

Mark Zuckerberg, Marrisa Mayer, and Google CEO Larry Page all decline invites to the summit where Obama is expect to urge tech firms to share data with the government. While Silicon Valley’s elite have snubbed the event, Cook’s appearance could be a big deal in his effort to advocate for the importance of privacy for users. Tim Cook’s appearance is expected soon, while President Obama is scheduled to take the stage at 2:15 ET.

You can watch a live feed of the summit below:

We still don’t know the exact date the Apple Watch will ship, but a new rumor claims you won’t be able to pick one up at BestBuy, Walmart, or other non-Apple Stores at launch.

Apple plans to make its timepiece an Apple Store exclusive, according to German distribution sources who claim resellers will be shut out so Cupertino can suck up as much Apple Watch profits in the first year as possible.

Professionals who work in creative industries know that the best media creation software titles are made by Adobe. Whether it’s getting pictures just right with Photoshop, or putting together an engaging digital newsletter with InDesign, Adobe makes software to tackle just about any creative situation.

While Adobe products are the industry standard in creativity software, they can also be complex and frustrating for novice users. That’s why Cult of Mac Deals is offering, for only a short while longer, Adobe Training Videos: Lifetime Subscription for the remarkably low price of $79.

To use hip hop parlance, Canadian rapper hip hop artist Drake has “dropped” a new surprise mixtape on iTunes. The precursor to his next studio album, “If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late” is a 17-track opus — announced late Thursday via Drake’s Twitter.

Boasting guest appearances from Lil Wayne, Travi$ Scott, and PARTYNEXTDOOR, the mixtape is expected to be the artist’s last under his current contract with label Cash Money Records.

However, while hip hop-heads will no doubt see the release as the big news here (and, if you’re a Drake fan, check out the track “You & The 6”), for Apple-watchers it’s significant for another reason.

Although Apple Pay has seen rapid adoption, it’s still only technically available in the United States. Credit cards issued by U.S. banks have been reported to work with NFC terminals around the world, but no international banks have supported the mobile payments solution yet.

Apple is already working on rolling out Apple Pay in Europe and China, and now it’s been reported that the company is in talks with banks in South America.

Apple plans to launch a new streaming music service this spring, but music industry insiders say Apple isn’t trying to just compete with Spotify, it wants to become the music business.

Tim Cook and Jimmy Iovine were two of the most in-demand people at this year’s Grammys. Eddy Cue and iTunes VP Robert Kondrk were also in attendance according to a new report from Billboard, which claims artists and labels execs alike were lined up at Clive Davis’ pre-Grammy gala to get a meeting with the biggest names in tech that are now poised to take on music, again.

Jimmy Iovine has devoted recent weeks to meeting senior execs at major and indie labels to talk about the new music service that will launch by summer at the latest and come alongside a major redesign of the iTunes Store as the company struggles to adapt to decline music sales.

Stephan Brusche was bored and starting to play with his food when he made a discovery that would change his life: Bananas are nice to draw on.

Graphic artists are paid to think this way, and Brusche was being urged by his wife to promote his work to a wider audience using Instagram.

“There wasn’t anything exciting to photograph,” said Brusche, 37, an artist for a travel agency in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. “I still had a banana and I thought maybe if I draw a smiley face on it, that would make a nice picture. I discovered how nicely the ink flows on the peel. It was really a pleasant surface.”

That smiley face, posted more than three years ago, received more likes than his work illustrations. And thus Fruitdoodles was born. Since then, Brusche has transformed more than 200 bananas into fine art.

Becoming a supplier for an Apple product is big competition among Asia Pacific suppliers, but Apple will rely on just one supplier to make all of its Apple Watch displays this year, reports J.P. Morgan analyst J.J. Park.

LG Display will be the sole supplier of the p-OLED display for the Apple Watch, according to Park’s recent note to investors. His firm also predicts LG’s stock could jump as much as 25% because of the new deal.

If you’ve been interested in trying out Apple’s iWork suite of productivity apps for yourself, but don’t have an Apple device to try them on, you’re in luck: Anyone can now create an Apple ID and sign into the iCloud Beta website to use Pages, Numbers and Keynote for free.

Apple has been getting tougher and tougher on its supply chain. Just yesterday, for example, Apple banned suppliers who used ‘bonded servitude’ as a way to keep workers on assembly lines. Overall, under Tim Cook’s conscientious leadership, conditions just continue to improve for the employees who make our iPhones and iPads.

But there is one way in which conditions have gotten worse for Apple’s supply chain employees. Although Apple limits factory workers to a 60-hour-work week, more supply chain workers went over that amount in 2014 than in 2013. But don’t start pulling your knives out just yet.

As rumors that Apple is making a self-driving car rev up, a peek under the hood of the company’s famed Industrial Design studio reveals a crew of talented automobile designers.

An interest in futuristic cars is embedded deep within the DNA of Apple’s vaunted design team. Working under Jony Ive, Apple employs designers who worked on several fantastic concept cars, including a fabric-covered BMW that shifts shape depending on speed.

Ive has long been obsessed by cars. (He has quite a stable.) As a teenager, Ive wanted to be a car designer. He visited a U.K. design school that specialized in automotives with a view to studying there, but he found the other students too weird. They were making “vroom vroom” noises as they sketched. Instead, he went to Newcastle Polytechnic (which has since been renamed Northumbria University).

A look at other key members of Apple’s design team, and at a super-secret research-and-development facility planned for the company’s new campus, offers a few clues about how Cupertino might go about producing innovative and unconventional cars.

Let’s face it: Freemium games and games with an inordinate number of in-app purchases are out of control on the App Store. To a certain extent, that’s understandable: Developers are hard-pressed to get anyone to download their games if they charge money for them, which means it’s all a race to the bottom. The only way to get any visibility is for developers to release their games free, then hope they can make money later.

In a refreshing move, though, Apple is trying to do something about its freemium problem, by highlighting “Pay Once & Play” games that charge players once upfront, then never bug them for more money again.

Apple is turning away developers who try to submit apps with guns in their screenshots or icons. But this isn’t a case of Apple introducing new rules to the App Store, so much as it is one of the company finally enforcing rules that have been there all along.

Saturday Night Live turns forty this year, and what better way to celebrate than by making a sizeable portion of the show’s most classic sketches available to enjoy whenever you want? With that in mind, a newly-launched iOS app boats more than 5,500 freely-available sketches, spanning the show’s entire four-decade (and counting) run.

Although SNL is already available on Netflix, the free app not only allows you to easily enjoy classic sketches on your subway ride to work, but also lets you search for appearances by individual cast members or characters — as opposed to having to trawl through entire episodes to get there.

Rob takes a look at the historic milestone Apple reached this past week when it closed it’s earnings at a record market capitalization: $700 billion, Buster lays on you twelve nuggets of business wisdom that Tim Cook revealed during the Apple CEO’s Goldman Sachs tech conference appearance, Alex gets addicted to ZeptoLab’s next big “mid-core” mobile game, King of Thieves, the whole Cult of Mac team digs deep into albums that matter, and Luke shares all about JetBlue’s plan to bring Apple Pay to 35,000 feet.

All this, and much more, in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine. Click on through and subscribe to get everything you may have missed in one easy to access place.

iOS users have had plenty of reasons to crow about Apple handsets recently, but here’s one for the Android crowd: Android devices running the latest Android 5.0 Lollipop mobile OS have a lower application crash rate than devices running Apple’s much-vaunted iOS 8.

The data was pulled by mobile application performance management company Crittercism, which claims that Lollipop’s crash rate for apps is a miniscule 2 percent, compared to iOS 8 which crashes 2.2 percent of the time. The same study also shows that iOS 8 crashes more than its predecessor, iOS 7.

While many of us will be celebrating Valentine’s Day this Saturday, for Apple it represents the end of an era.

At 10pm today, Apple will close its existing Oakridge retail store in San Jose, California — with a new, larger one set to open Saturday morning at 10am. In the process, Apple will have marked the end of its mini-store experiment, with the Oakridge venue being the last of its kind.

First launched in 2004, Apple’s mini-stores were an effort to quickly roll out new Apple Stores to keep up with demand at a time when the company was unable to find enough of the larger sites it was looking for. Nine mini-stores were opened in all — ranging in size from 2,000-square-feet down to a tiny 500-square foot.

Despite being a brand targeted at creatives, along with Steve Jobs’ background as an acid-dropping hippie, Apple’s always been pretty resolutely anti-drug in its message. Perhaps that’s not such a surprise, really: When you become the most valuable publicly-traded company in history, it makes sense not to do things that could offend your investors.

Previously, Apple’s anti-drug ethos has meant that “Apps that encourage excessive consumption of alcohol or illegal substances, or encourage minors to consume alcohol or smoke cigarettes, will be rejected.” Even when apps like the controversial cannabis-growing game Weed Firm do somehow slip through the cracks and make it to the top of the free iPhone games chart, Apple has booted them out as soon as it’s made aware of their existence.

But as marijuana laws change, so too does Apple.

Adobe’s Lightroom app for iOS is actually pretty good, but you have to pay for a Creative Cloud subscription to use it.

What if you could have the power of an editing suite like Lightroom without all of the extra fuss? You want just one app for editing pictures on the go, but it needs to be easy to use and full featured.

Enter Darkroom, the hottest new photography app for iPhone.

Apple is making iMessage and FaceTime harder to hack by turning on two-step verification for both services in an effort to tighten security for iOS and Mac users.

The extra security goes into effect today and gives users an extra layer of protection against hackers or anyone else trying to log in to your iMessage account to either impersonate you or steal data.