Mike Choi, a talented, experienced comic book artist, was drooling.

We were talking on the phone about Midnight Rises, a new digital comic app that explains the rich sci-fi backdrop of Midnight Star, an upcoming first-person shooter for mobile devices from Industrial Toys.

Choi had just had some teeth pulled, and was still kind of loopy when we got to chat with him and two other Industrial Toys execs, President Tim Harris and CEO Alex Seropian (you may know him as one of the co-founders of Bungie Software) about their first iOS app, a re-visioning of what visual storytelling can do.

Most digital comics are just a reformatting of traditional print comics to fit on a touchscreen. Midnight Rises goes further, using the tricks of video games to tell a comic-book style story.

“We hate motion comics,” said Choi. “This was way more work than just turning the canvas on its side.”

I don’t care who you are. I don’t care if you don’t even like Batman. This beautiful, remote-controlled, iPhone-compatible Batmobile? It’s the toy that Gotham — hell, everybody! — deserves.

Coming off a record-breaking financial quarter — largely thanks to the astonishing success of the iPhone 6 — it’s worth asking who Apple owes its present success to.

While everyone is quick to mention the usual suspects (Tim Cook and Jony Ive being two of the most prominent), a name you don’t hear bandied about so much is Jeff Williams. He’s Apple’s operations whiz, the VP whose job it is to make sure products get manufactured, shipped and delivered on time, and with the highest possible standards.

Ever wonder how Apple was able to go from shipping 10 million iPhones in the whole of 2008 to 74 million in the past quarter alone, without missing a beat? That would be Jeff Williams, the guy Fortune once called “Tim Cook’s Tim Cook.”

Here’s why he deserves your respect — and the $24.5 million he took home last year.

Although the iMac generated a whole lot of buzz for Apple upon Steve Jobs’ return in the late 1990s, it was the debut of the iPod in October 2001 that truly dispatched Apple on its path to astronomical levels of success: a path it hasn’t strayed from in the near decade-and-a-half since then.

Which is why it’s kind of sad to realize that on Apple’s most recent quarterly filing, the “little MP3 player that could” has been unceremoniously shuffled (get it?) into the “Other Products” category, along with such “hobby” project as Apple TV.

To be fair, Apple had warned everyone this would happen back in October 2014, but seeing the iPod no longer mentioned with Apple’s flagship products is a reminder of how the once mighty have fallen — and how much Apple’s core business has changed since the millennium.

Alas, poor iPod! We knew you well!

This week, Luke details all the ways those original iPad haters were utterly wrong on the fifth anniversary of Apple’s category-busting tablet, Luke has a sneak peek at the stunning mural for a new Apple retail store in Chongqing, China, Evan takes us into the bizarre world of the latest Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell game, Buster slams through the seven biggest reveals in Apple’s record-smashing quarterly earning’s call, and Rob writes up five super easy tips to master iPhone, with a huge assist from video auteur, Stephen Smith.

Be sure to catch all of these stories and many more in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine, available for free right now.

As China continues its march to become one of Apple’s most important markets, the country’s press have been given a special advance preview of the company’s forthcoming second Chongqing Apple Store, set to open at 10am local time this Saturday, January 31.

Not dissimilar to the concept behind Apple’s Fifth Avenue flagship store in New York, the new Chongqing Apple Store features a stunning glass structure emblazoned with the Apple logo, leading to an underground shopping area. In doing so, the store recycles the design Apple first created for its Pudong retail store in Shanghai.

Check out some some other beautiful inside images after the jump.

Apple’s got more money in the bank right now than you or I could ever make if we were giving thousands of lifetimes. Due to tax laws, however, most of it is kept overseas — a not unusual business practice for major multinationals, although that hasn’t stopped it earning Apple a ton of bad press.

Two U.S. senators have a plan to bring the money back to the United States, though — along with similar (smaller) cash piles held by other tech giants like Microsoft and Google.

And for once it’s a plan we think Cupertino might actually be happy to consider.

It’s been six months since Apple unveiled iTunes 12, the latest version of its multimedia mega-app. Updates since then have been few and far between, but today Apple released the first big one: iTunes 12.1, which introduced a swank new media control widget for Notification Center.

China’s elite class overwhelmingly prefers Apple products for gift giving, even more so than luxury fashion brands like Gucci and Chanel.

An interesting survey conducted by Hurun asked 376 Mainland Chinese millionaires about their buying habits, and their responses also bode quite favorably for the forthcoming Apple Watch.

Apple has really been upping its game with curated app collections, and today a slew of amazing productivity apps were put on sale as part of a new “Get Productive” roundup in the App Store.

It’s the most impressive collection of app deals we’ve ever seen in the store. Many of the included apps have been discounted by more than 50 percent.

One of the first projects Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer oversaw as CEO was the Yahoo Weather app. The app was so well received that it even ended up receiving a coveted Apple Design Award in 2013.

Apple also redesigned its stock Weather app to look just like it in iOS 7.

It turns out that it wasn’t a coincidence the two apps looked so similar. Jony Ive was “tormented” with jealously of Yahoo Weather’s design.

Watching almost anybody explain technology can be torturous. But watching talking heads and fresh-faced kids from the ’90s rave about the wonders of the Internet — the miraculous “information superhighway” that was about to change life on Earth — is made even more heinous when their saccharine explanations get remixed and run through AutoTune.

Still, the hideously catchy new song and video “Just Surf the Net” will transport you back to a time when everybody wasn’t online all the time. And fashion was worse than you remember.

Tourists are invading Phoenix like locusts this weekend thanks to the Waste Management Open and a little football game called the Super Bowl. And while all the snowbirds are running around the valley watching golfers, snapping pics of gridiron superstars and taking in the unbelievable Arizona weather, Uber has a secret plan to lure fans into its black sedans.

Starting today, Uber is partnering with Mophie to deliver free JuicePacks to riders across the Phoenix valley, and they might just throw in an NFL superstar to go with it.

This afternoon I tested out the Mophie giveaway and wasn’t surprised how quickly an Uber SUV pulled up to my apartment. But when my driver opened up the passenger door to reveal Arizona Cardinals’ running back Andre Ellington, chilling like this is just what he does in the off season, I nearly lost my cool.

Developers trying to update their apps on iTunes got a surprise this morning, when thanks to a weird glitch with iTunes Connect, devs were logged into other users’ accounts.

Not only has the outage prevented developers from being able to log into their own accounts to update apps, but it’s also exposed apps that are secretly in development to competitors.

Developers have taken to Twitter this morning expressing their outrage, with some calling for Apple to just take an ax to any cable leading to the iTunes Connect servers. Apple has yet to release an official statement, but they have finally taken iTunes connect offline, hours after the first reports hit.

Tim Cook told investors he’s optimistic that the iPhone 6 still has legs, mostly because it has the highest Android switcher rate the company has seen in over three years.

The bigger screen was supposed to cause an avalanche of Android switchers, but according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, most of them must have come from outside the U.S.

Take a lot at their analysis of the last three years of new iPhone buyers:

Like glitter itself, the story on shipyourenemiesglitter.com just won’t go away.

But eventually it will and that could mean trouble for the undisclosed buyer of the website that promises to mail glitter bombs to enemies, according to a London-based broker who specializes in online businesses.

In a post published today by FE International headlined How to Waste $85k Buying Glitter, Thomas Smale predicts the buyer won’t make his money back. If Smale is wrong, he will willing pour a bucket of glitter over himself.

You can pack pretty much anything into a survival kit: food, water, blankets. What you can’t pack, however, is 20,000mAh of electrical power to give life to your communications devices – until now, that is.

Introducing the foward thinking ZeroLemon Solar Charge External Battery, one of the cool gadgets featured at CES 2015 and available at Cult of Mac Deals for a limited time.

Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric are together again and still clueless about technology.

The former Today Show hosts were reunited not on a morning show couch but in BMW’s i3 electric car for a Super Bowl ad that has them reliving a 1994 segment when they could not explain the Internet. The commercial, in just three days on YouTube, has more than 4.6 million views.

“What is the Internet anyway,” Gumbel asks. “Do you write to it like mail?” Gumbel was admitting he did not quite know how to tease a story that would have more information on the NBC website. “That little mark – a – with the ring around it.” A colleague offers the answer “at” with Gumbel saying, “That’s what I said. Katie said she thought it was ‘about.’ ”

Apple just had a killer quarter. In fact, it was the most profitable quarter for any company in history. As such, Apple stock is up 5 percent since Wednesday trading.

But has Apple peaked? Not according to legendary investor Carl Icahn, who recently told CNBC that he was not only raising his own Apple stock price target, but called buying AAPL a “no-brainer.”

iOS 8 brought with it a couple of keyboard changes — adding support for predictive text suggestions when you’re using the built-in iOS keyboard.

This is pretty great stuff, unless it bugs you to have three words or phrases at the top of your keyboard. If that’s you, then here’s a simple way to disable the “feature.”

Although unlimited data was a promise carriers like AT&T once used to lure potential customers to their network, it doesn’t really exist anymore. Even if you have an unlimited data contract, carriers will throttle your connection once you push a certain data allowance every month.

Yet it’s starting to look like the Federal Trade Commission might be moving against carriers that throttle so-called “unlimited” connections. The FTC just smashed TracFone with a $40 million fine for throttling customers of its unlimited data service.

The first airplane was in flight for 12 seconds and flew 120 feet. But it was enough to send imaginations airborne.

  Not long after Kitty Hawk, aviators were trying to figure out how to fly a car.

Glenn Curtiss was the first with the Autoplane in 1917. It had a triwing, looked like a Model T and hopped. Before he could actually get its wheels off the ground, World War I broke out and Curtiss diverted his energy toward building aircraft for the U.S. Army.

While we have figured out how to put people in space, we’re still tinkering with a future that has yet to arrive. If you’re waiting for George Jetson’s future, consider that the car his family flew around in was a 2062 model.

Yesterday, Apple announced that it had a monster quarter. In Q4, it sold 74.5 million iPhone sales to go along with $74.6 billion in revenue and $18 billion in profits. Not only that, but it broke the record for the most money made by any corporation in history.

Having a hard time figuring out how to quantify numbers like that? Check out this incredible visualizer.

Back in December, we noted that Microsoft had acquired the popular iOS and Android email app Acompli, which offered a more task-oriented approach to email, with the ability to schedule meetings, edit your calendar, and in your most important emails to the top of the page.

Just under two months on, and Microsoft is launching a cross-platform version of Outlook for the first time ever — incorporating pretty much all the tools previously found in Acompli.

And don’t worry: if you’re not a user of Microsoft’s email services, Outlook also supports Yahoo, iCloud and Gmail accounts.

At least one of the big boys is planning on developing an app for the Apple Watch. eBay has posted an ad listing, looking for a developer to help them come up with a bidding app for Cupertino’s new smartwatch.