Despite attracting the absolute best talent, the Aliens franchise has been on a bit of a rough patch for the last, oh, 30 years or so.

Ridley Scott’s Prometheus prequel? It sucked. Alien: Resurrection, a joint written by Joss Whedon and filmed by the director of City of Lost Children? It blew. Alien 3, directed by multiple Academy Award winner David Fincher? Well, I’ve personally always thought it got a bum rap, but the general consensus is: It’s terrible.

Now Neil Blomkamp, the talented South African director behind District 9 and the upcoming Chappie, has been hired to film the next Alien movie. And thanks to Blomkamp, we have a pretty good idea what the movie will be about.

Here’s a small detail you might have missed about the Apple Watch. In pictures for the Apple Watch Edition, the 18-karat solid gold version of Cupertino’s upcoming wearable, the Digital Crown has a small dot at the end that matches the color of the watch strap. But here’s a question for you: Is Apple going to allow users to customize the Digital Crown as easily as they can swap out Apple Watch wristbands?

There was the buzz going into Sundance and the applause of satisfied audiences at the end of the movie’s screening. But there was also a collective gasp as the last line of the credits rolled past.

Shot on the iPhone 5s.

Sean Baker’s Tangerine, the story of two transgender sex workers in Hollywood, was a break-out hit at the renowned film festival in January. The Hollywood Reporter said the film stands out as “crisp and vigorously cinematic.”

Oft-praised for the rich fringe characters in his independent films, Baker did not set out to change the filmmaking landscape by shooting with a cellphone. Like most indie filmmakers, he had no money.

In Ian Parker’s excellent New Yorker profile of Apple’s Jony Ive, the Apple design maestro is mentioned to be disparaging of an unnamed competitor who allows customers to make their devices into “whatever you want.”

Apparently, Motorola thinks the comment was about them, and Motorola CEO Rick Osterloh is now firing back, calling Apple’s pricing “outrageous” and taking issue with Ive’s comments.

Apple hasn’t yet announced prices for its 18-karat-gold Apple Watch Edition timepieces, but if you think the top-of-the-range wearable is going to cost anything under $5,000, you’ve got another thing coming.

Greg Koenig, co-founder of Luma Labs, recently performed a calculation to find out an approximate figure for the gold content of the forthcoming 42mm gold Apple Watch. While Koenig notes that his guess is a “very rough estimate,” it still makes for interesting eye-watering (iWatering?) reading.

His guess? 29.16 grams — which translates to $853.82 at today’s gold prices. And that’s without even taking the electronics into account.

Given that Apple can’t make an iPhone with a battery life of more than (best case scenario) a couple of days, how would it ever manage with a far more power-intensive technology like, say, an electric car?

It seems that this is exactly the question being asked in Cupertino — and the attempt to answer it has landed Apple with a new lawsuit, filed earlier this month in Massachusetts federal court.

As per the complaint, back in June last year, Apple reportedly began an “aggressive campaign” to poach top engineers from the electric car battery maker A123 Systems. The engineers were responsible for performing critical development and testing activities on cutting-edge electric vehicle batteries.

After gracing the cover of Vogue China, it was only a matter of time before the Apple Watch started getting featured in U.S. magazines.

Self’s March issue features the Apple Watch modeled by Victoria’s Secret Angel Candice Swanepoel.

“Sometimes the more you look,” says Tony Shaloub as Freddy Riedenschneider in The Man Who Wasn’t There, “the less you really know.”

Which, of course, sounds like the main theme of almost any Coen brothers film you might have seen; the duo tends to pack even their more mainstream film work with quirky, interesting characters who muse on the meaning of life while behaving, well, oddly.

Steven Baxter, an author, broadcaster and filmmaker, has edited all the films from the Coens’ oeuvre into one stunning visual essay that focuses on themes present in many of the Coen films.

“…this essay has the characters talk to one another across the films so we can more clearly hear the Coens’ dominant concerns: identity, miscommunication and morality,” writes Baxter in the video description. “Taken as a trinity, these elements indicate that the Coens’ true subject is the search for value in a random and amoral universe.”

Here’s a comics crossover you can drink to: Rogue Ales is bottling a birthday brew for Hellboy.

Rogue’s Right Hand of Doom Red Ale pays tribute to the demon-spawn character created by Mike Mignola. A Mignola drawing of the wisecracking, cigar-chomping, supernatural badass adorns the label, just as the comics franchise reaches legal drinking age in the United States.

Samsung has bought its own Apple Pay competitor with LoopPay, a U.S. startup that makes cases and accessories for wirelessly transmitting card data with a magnetic signal.

First rumored back in December, Samsung will allegedly integrate LoopPay’s technology into its upcoming phones in an effort to ride the growing mobile payments trend created by Apple Pay.

The eastern U.S. is still getting pelted with snow, but spring is arriving a little early across the pond in Saltaire England thanks to David Hockney’s newest gallery of iPad artwork entitled ‘The Arrival of Spring.’

The famous pop artist’s exhibition of 33 pictures went on display today at the Salt Mill gallery in West Yorkshire. Each of the five-foot high framed pictures were drawn on Hockney’s iPad during the period when he lived in Bridlington and painted the Yorkshire woods for London’s Royal Academy.

Take a closer look at some of the piece below:

The iPhone has been killing it in Japan lately. Apple’s smartphone marketshare in the tech-obsessed country is continuing to dominate year-over-year, even though the company had a hard time giving out iPhones just five years ago.

With the iPhone 6’s bigger screen, the company is making more of an inroads than ever, but according to a report from Reuters, smartphones in Japan are facing stiff from competition from an unlikely suspect: flip-phones.

Apple’s architectural firm, Foster + Partners, released pictures of the gorgeous new West Lake store in Hangzhou that was recently completed. The new Apple Store was covered by an incredible mural during construction, but the finished all-glass facade is even more stunning.

The firm says West Lake store was made in close collaboration between Apple and Foster + Partners’ engineers to create the perfect environment to view products. The end result is a 15-metre-high glazed box with a design that “combines an understanding of the local context with the philosophy of simplicity, beauty and technical innovation that characterises Apple’s products.”

Check out the store’s floating staircase below:

Sitting is bad for you. A quick Google search shows tons of research on how standing throughout the day will make you significantly healthier and possibly even extend your life.

Thanks to the scientific community’s heightened focus on sitting’s negative side effects in recent years, there’s no shortage of standing desks to choose from for just about any situation.

We’ve reviewed our fair share at Cult of Mac, like the NextDesk Terra, the NewHeights, and the Ergotron WorkFit-A. But the new M1 from Stir Kinetic Desk is not only as elegant and high-quality as anything we’ve seen, it’s way smarter.

The Apple Watch Edition has perplexed many Apple fanboys with its ridiculously high price tag. We still don’t know how much the beautiful, high-end smartwatch will cost, but it’s expected be one of the most expensive Apple products ever, which has a lot of analysts wondering, how many is Apple going sell?

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that only 17 percent of the first 5 million Apple Watch orders were for the pricey gold Edition. That number sounds almost insignificant, but Daring Fireball’s John Gruber did some math and found that Apple is expecting to sell about 1 million of the exorbitantly expensive timepieces per quarter.

Hitting 1 million in sales for the super-expensive smartwatches in the first quarter would be an impressive feat. But what’s more surprising is that if Apple actually hits that number, the gold Edition Apple Watches would account for the most Apple Watch revenue, bringing in at least $5 billion per quarter.

Here’s why:

John Hayward-Mayhew is one of the most prolific iOS developers ever to peddle a blackjack game. Over the past four years, the 25-year-old entrepreneur flooded the App Store with an astonishing 600 separate apps — everything from endless runners such as Dangerous Caveman Bum Runner to dentistry games like Emergency Dentist Race — raking in close to $1 million in the process.

The most miraculous part of all? He can’t even code.

But by taking advantage of one of the App Store’s great weaknesses, and borrowing a game plan from one of Hollywood’s most unusual impresarios, he’s built a one-man gaming empire.

Under openly gay CEO Tim Cook, Apple has done a lot to forward gay rights. A year ago, the company stood up against homophobic legislation going through Arizona and organized a company-wide march in San Francisco’s annual gay pride parade.

All in all, Apple’s one of the most gay-friendly companies you can work for. So here’s a shocker for you: When Apple figured out it had accidentally hired someone with a history of anti-gay activities, it quickly severed contact.

Apple Pay is less than six months old, and already it’s taking over the mobile payment world. The latest convert? Early adopter Staples, which announced yesterday that it is already seeing 30 percent of all purchases made through its iOS app made using Apple Pay.

“Right now it’s the number one payment method for us in our iOS apps,” said Prat Vemana, vice president of mobile commerce for the stationary company, speaking during a panel discussion hosted in Seattle on Tuesday.

There’s less than a month left before Sony’s first original television show airs on its flagship video game brand, PlayStation.

Based on Eisner award-winning comic Powers by Brian Michael Bendis (Daredevil, X-Men) and Michael Avon Oeming (B.P.R.D., The Mice Templar), the new show will air exclusively on the PlayStation platform, bypassing traditional distribution methods and heading straight for the gut of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video services.

It’s got an all-star cast and an intellectual property as wildly popular as The Walking Dead, a comic that AMC took and build a successful cable show around.

The creators of Powers hope they can do the same thing, of course, but it will no doubt be an uphill battle, with fewer PlayStation consoles than cable subscriptions in US households.

While most people are excited about the possibility that Apple might build a car to take on Tesla, former CEO of General Motors, Dan Akerson, has some warning words for Tim Cook: namely that Apple should steer clear of getting into the automotive industry.

“If I were an Apple shareholder, I wouldn’t be very happy,” Akerson told Bloomberg. “I would be highly suspect of the long-term prospect of getting into a low-margin, heavy-manufacturing.”

Well, if anyone would know, it’s the ex-head of beleaguered GM.

In a U.K. industry first, two major banks in the United Kingdom are finally adding Touch ID identification to their iOS apps.

RBS and NatWest customers must activate the feature using their existing security information, but can use Touch ID after that. As with the Touch ID login on iPhone, users who get three failed login attempts to their banking services will have to re-enter their passcodes.

Congressman John Lewis paid a visit to Tim Cook at Apple’s Cupertino campus today as part of the civil rights icon’s Northern California tour for his new book.

The Georgia lawmaker played a pivotal role in the bloody Selma march that’s back in the spotlight thanks to the its 50th anniversary and the Oscar-nominated film by the same name. Lewis was a guest speaker at Apple HQ today as part of the company’s celebration for Black History Month, and he met privately with Cook.

When camera companies began putting a “record” button on DSLRs, things got really interesting for Rob Whitworth. Is he a photographer or a filmmaker?

The ambiguity about his work description does not matter for anyone who has taken a heart-racing, stomach-dropping ride through his time-lapse videos.

In his latest, Dubai Flow Motion, viewers will feel shot out of a canon for a three-minute hectic but thorough tour of this sparkling Middle East city. Whitworth’s camera will take you up the tallest skyscraper, send you blasting through its floors to see rooms teeming with life and send you crashing into the sea.

You’d think one patent-infringement lawsuit would be enough, but Ryan Seacrest’s iPhone case startup clearly didn’t get the message after its last courtroom tangle with BlackBerry.

The new Typo Keyboard for the iPhone 6 was supposed to have fixed any infringement issues committed by its predecessor, but that is apparently not the case. This week BlackBerry filed another lawsuit against Typo, claiming the case maker “slavishly copied” its keyboard design “down to the smallest detail.”

Eccentric rocker Neil Young has never been swayed by the critics. He has always made the music he wanted.

But he may not be able to be so carefree, as some critics eviscerate his latest musical endeavor – a pricey, Kickstarter-funded digital music player aimed at rescuing music from the MP3 format.

The PonoPlayer, resembling a Toblerone bar in shape and color, was supposed to revolutionize the digital listening experience and with a $400 price tag, not to mention a $6.2 million Kickstarter campaign, expectations were high. Users can download music from the Pono site and listen to high-quality files that restore the quality historically compressed out of digital music.

Turns out, it sounds no better than music on an iPhone, according to several critics who have put the PonoPlayer through its paces.