As tech fans, it’s easy to take a forward-looking view of technology: constantly excited about the next iPhone or smart wearable, while our old gadgets gather dust in the back of a cupboard somewhere.

Hoping to reach some of those tech owners, the SIU School of Medicine in Illinois is currently requesting old iPods as part of what it calls the “Music and Memory” program to help people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia.

As the medical school explains it, the iPods are used for a form of musical therapy designed to help calm patients and make them happier and more sociable by playing music from their younger years.

Sony and Marvel have struck a deal, paving the way for everyone’s favorite sass-mouthed wall crawler, Spider-Man, to appear in films alongside Iron Man, Captain America and the Avengers.

Let’s rewind a bit. The year is 1996, and after overextending itself during the previous decade’s comics boom, Marvel Comics is broke. But along comes an Israeli toy designer named Avi Arad to save the company, who famously tells creditors not to give up on Marvel yet (“Spider-Man alone is worth a billion dollars,” Arad reportedly said at the time).

Things aren’t looking too rosy for Samsung at the moment. Having seen profits slip due to its falling mobile sales, the flailing South Korean tech giant is reportedly considering throwing in the towel altogether in Japan, where it’s struggling more than elsewhere.

Samsung currently represents a miniscule 4 percent of the Japanese smartphone market, which puts it in sixth place. According to sources with Samsung, staying in Japan is actually losing rather than gaining the company money.

While Samsung hasn’t traditionally been a top-seller in Japan, here in 2015 it’s doing worse than ever: with the company’s favorite metric, marketshare, shrinking from 17 percent two years ago to low single digits today.

San Francisco design firm Ammunition beat out Apple and others to be named Fast Company’s top “Innovative Company in Design.”

Co-founded by Robert Brunner, the former head of Apple’s industrial design studio who hired Jony Ive, Ammunition is most famous for designing the Beats Electronics headphones. Ammunition was named most innovative not just for the string of hit products it’s helped bring to market but for taking an equity stake in the companies with which it works.

Brian Williams may be waiting for the brouhaha to wear off his “mis-remembering” of which helicopter he was in during the 2003 war in Iraq, but the internets will just not let it go.

He might have conflated his experience as a reporter with that of the actual soldiers who were fired upon, but the meme police are making sure this faux pas lives on forever, creating hilarious photo “evidence” that not only was Williams at Gettysburg, but also present for the first moon landing and riding along with O.J. in his white Bronco slow roll.

Check out some of the choicest photographic “evidence” of the disgraced news anchor below, from some of the funniest minds on the interwebs.

First it was reported that Apple and Tesla are in an intense bidding war for each other’s talent, and now an anonymous Apple employee has come out of the woodwork to talk smack.

Galactic crime lord Jabba the Hutt may just be the most costly puppet ever made.

“I knew that he was expensive in that with the full crew involved,” says puppeteer Toby Philpott in a new video, “it would be about a dozen people.”

In this new documentary from London-based Jamie Benning, you’ll get a literal inside look at how this immense, multi-person operated puppet was put together and performed by the two to three men inside the Hutt, as well as the various people controlling the eyes via radio control outside.

Take a look at the video below to peek inside the creature.

Breaking Bad is dead, but it’s all good man. Saul Goodman is back!

The Breaking Bad prequel, Better Call Saul, broke cable records with 4.4 million viewers last night, and there are several ways to watch the premiere online.

iTunes and AMC are offering Episode 1, titled “Uno,” for free.

Imagine cruising low around South Africa in your small plane at 105 knots. You’re enjoying the scenery below when all the sudden your plane’s canopy pops open just wide enough to send your bag with a MacBook Air plummeting 1,000 feet to its death.

That’s exactly what happened to one pilot, only lucky for him, the MacBook Air miraculously survived. Redditor av80r posted pictures of his still-functioning MacBook Air after it fell out of his plane mid-flight. According to his story, the farmer who found it claims he heard a whistling sound. He looked up and saw a bag hurtling towards him and took one step to the left and watched it land near where he was standing.

Despite the crash landing, the MacBook Air still works. Although the cooling system is damaged and the glass on the trackpad was busted into a million fragments, the display is hanging on like a champion.

Here’s a view from the side:

Apple’s upcoming Photos app will give Mac users powerful new tools to manage, tweak and share their favorite images. While it won’t be released until later this year, we got a chance to play around with the beta version now available to developers, and we found it to be an easy-to-use and streamlined piece of software.

For a detailed and visual look at this new iOS-influenced app, check out the video below for a quick run through some of Photos’ hottest new features.

Apple’s release notes for the first iOS 8.3 beta don’t mention any new features, but we’ve combed through the just-released update to discover a number of goodies.

iOS 8.3 won’t overwhelm you with new features, but if you love CarPlay, emojis and Apple Pay, you’ll enjoy a couple surprises.

Here’s everything that’s new in iOS 8.3:

iOS 8.2 hasn’t even been released to the public yet, but Apple is already moving on to the next version. The first beta build of iOS 8.3 was seeded to developers this morning while iOS 8.2 beta 5 is still being tested.

The software update was made available today in the iOS Dev Center. Along with iOS 8.3, Apple has also released a beta build of Xcode 6.3 that includes Swift 1.2. The release notes don’t mention any new features, but we’ll tell you about all the goodies we find as soon as it’s installed on our iPhones.

In the meantime, here are the direct download links:

As many of us use Google calendar to manage our daily lives, it’s an important thing to get this wondrous scheduling solution on our iPhones and iPads to better able to access it on the go.

Several third-party calendars, like the ever-useful and visually stunning Fantastical 2, use the iOS system for connecting to and synchronizing your calendars from Google to your mobile device.

Usually this works without a hitch, especially with newer iOS versions; you simply add an account and the calendar events you input on the web will show up on your iPhone, and vice versa.

When that doesn’t work, however, the settings you need to tweak can be a bit unintuitive. Here’s what they should look like for the best two-way Google to iOS sync.

Apple is sitting on more cash than King Midas could dream of, but instead of bringing that money back to the U.S. to fund stock buybacks, Apple is reportedly looking to exploit Switzerland’s low interest rates with a Swiss Franc bond sale.

Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse have been hired to manage the potential sale, reports the Wall Street Journal, which says the new bond sale could come as soon as Tuesday.

It’s a pretty common sight: Using an iOS device that is short on battery life while it’s charging with an even shorter Lightning cable.

Now you can get the range of motion you need to comfortably use your iOS device with The 10 Ft. MFi-Certified iOS Lightning Cable, more than half off for a limited time at Cult of Mac Deals.

Things couldn’t be going better for Apple on the iPhone front. The company just posted the most profitable quarter ever in the history of corporations thanks to strong iPhone sales. And according to the latest report from Cannacord, Apple is basically the only company in the world making money off smartphones.

Apple accounted for 93% of smartphone profits in Q4 2014 reports Canaccord Genuity’s Mike Walkley who has also raised his target price on AAPL shares up to $145. That’s bad news for LG, Samsung, HTC and anyone else that makes smartphones, and to make it even worse, Cannacord estimates one third of all smartphone users will own an iPhone by the end of 2018.

See the full breakdown of profits per company below:

New app Cloe is a dutiful concierge service you can text to request a good jazz club or microbrewery and get an informed, cheery response in a minute or less. Think of the mad research skills of Siri with the personality of Samantha, the AI operating system from the movie Her.

Need a tailor? Cloe may ask if you need a custom shirt made or just a button sewn on a jacket before she sends you a recommendation based on where you are standing at that very moment.

Dr. Dre became one of the most iconic figures in tech last year when Apple acquired his company, Beats Electronics. But before the doctor was making billions off overpriced headphones, he started a revolution in the music world with his pals Ice Cube, M.C. Ren and Eazy-E. Now there’s a movie coming out to tell his story.

Biopic Straight Outta Compton follows the meteoric rise and fall of N.W.A. in the mid-1980s. The film was produced by Ice Cube and Dr. Dre and is set to premiere August 14. To celebrate the upcoming film, Dre and Cube got together to ride around Compton and reminisce about the music they created before introducing their movie’s first NSFW trailer.

Watch the full red-band trailer below:

I’m a total sucker for ads which jump back in time to show how things have changed over the years, and that’s exactly what American Express has done with its latest commercial for Apple Pay: showing how Apple’s mobile payment technology is, in fact, just the latest in a long line of innovations used for making financial transactions easier.

The ad features archival appearances by famous AmEx cardholders ranging from Jerry Seinfeld and Jim Henson to Tina Fey, for a mashup ad that is more fun than you’d ever expect from a credit card company.

It’s also another triumph for Apple Pay, which has now been promoted in ads by Capital One, MasterCard, Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, among others. Check out AmEx’s ad after the jump:

Need bags of speedy storage you can take with you anywhere you go? With VisionTek’s USB Pocket SSD, you get a bus-powered solid-state drive that’s small enough to fit in your palm, and fast enough for almost anything.

I’ve been using one as a Windows drive for my Mac for the past few months; let me tell you why it’s been great.

If you’re a creative director, designer, or just enjoy using your Mac for graphics editing, you may want to check out the new Photoshop rival, Affinity Photo.

Currently available as a public beta, this pro-level photo software and graphics editor boasts some pretty impressive features — with an emphasis on real-time editing, meaning no previews, “apply” buttons, or hanging around to wait for an effect to render.

You can read up on more details after the jump. Best of all? Unlike the subscription-only Photoshop, you can currently download Affinity Photo for free.

Knowing how much is at stake, things can get pretty vicious when you’re a manufacturer with a shot at providing Apple with vital components for its next generation iPhone.

We’ve known for some time that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung have been battling it out over who gets picked by Apple to make its forthcoming A9 processors — with Samsung apparently having the advantage currently, due to offering Apple a better deal financially.

TSMC isn’t taking this lying down, however. In fact, the company is currently suing an ex-employee who allegedly leaked R&D secrets to Samsung; thereby allowing it to both catch up in the chip fabrication business.

When it comes to buying Apple products, you should make sure a deal isn’t too good to be true when you sign up for it.

A U.K. man who purchased a MacBook on eBay for a bargain price was surprised by what arrived in the mail — not a laptop but a black-and-white photograph of a MacBook.

Ahead of last night’s 57th annual Grammy Awards, Apple debuted a brand new iPad commercial called “Change,” showing just how easy it is to record music on the iPad.

I have very few complaints about iOS 8, and based on casual conversations I’ve had with friends plus the high percentage of users who have upgraded to Apple’s latest mobile OS, I’d suggest the same thing is true across the board.

One part of iOS I use very rarely, however, is Notification Center, which aims to be a one-stop-shop for all the information you need to know, but instead looks like a strangely un-Apple mass of informational overload.

Apparently Stockholm-based MobileCreative designers Petter Andersson, Friðgeir Torfi Ásgeirsson and Jonas Jerlström feel the same way, because they’ve come up with a concept video showing a new possible notification interface for iOS. And you know what? I kind of love it.