SALT LAKE CITY — Mother Nature’s got a million ways to make your life miserable. Luckily, the outdoor industry is filled with innovators, entrepreneurs and inspired inventors working incessantly to make your adventures more epic and less stressful.

The sheer number of companies hawking advanced snowshoes, crampons and things made of Merino wool proved a little mind-numbing last week at Outdoor Retailer 2015, the industry’s largest convention.

Everything from stitch-free puffy jackets to shoes made with Michelin tire technology were on display in the giant convention center, but we waded past the immense numbers of mannequins and bowls filled with enticing fresh fruit (rather than convention-standard Red Vines) to bring you a few of the more interesting gadgets, clothing items and even a new camera strap for your micro 4:3 camera.

Given that Tim Cook thinks China will soon overtake the U.S. as Apple’s biggest market, it’s no surprise that Apple is taking its expansion into China seriously.

Amidst plans to open 25 new retail stores in the country by 2016, Apple has just released a new video showing a new mural outside its upcoming second Apple store in Chongqing, set to open at 10am local time on January 31.

The mural was created as a collaboration between international photographer and former engineer Navid Baraty (best known for these spectacular vertigo-inducing cityscapes) and artist Yangyang Pan.

Ever since Apple made the tactical error of giving everyone a free U2 album (#firstworldproblems), the company has been a tad on the, well, miserly side — with no Mac, iPad or iPhone discounts on Black Friday, and even the company’s customary 12 Days of Christmas giveaway canceled. Bah, humbug!

Clearly someone in Cupertino (head of retail Angela Ahrendts?) has woken up in a newly charitable mood, however, because Apple has just updated its iTunes Store app for both iOS and desktop with a new “Free on iTunes” curated section, which helps customers find content they can download without having to rack up any extra post-Christmas credit card bills.

Update: Downplaying reports about the size of its impending layoffs, IBM says it will let go of only “several thousand people,” not the much-larger number reported by Forbes. We’ve updated this story and its headline to reflect IBM’s statements.

Things aren’t going well for IBM. Six months into its partnership with Apple, Big Blue is reportedly preparing for the largest corporate layoff in history.

After nearly three years of quarterly revenue decline, IBM is preparing to ax a staggering 111,800 employees, according to Forbes. Saying it does not respond to “ridiculous” rumors, IBM says the layoffs will be much smaller than that. How the layoffs will affect the company’s business with Apple remains unclear.

There are dozens of great deals at Cult of Mac Deals every day. Today we highlight 3 offers that are ending very soon.

This is your last chance to get in on these popular offers for The 10 Ft. MFI-Certified iOS Lightning Cable, a lifetime of unlimited mobile backups with IDrive and the BACtrack Vio.

Save in a big way with Pay What You Want bundles at Cult of Mac Deals. Pay What You Want bundles offer a convenient way to get elite level training, software, design assets and more at a price point of your choosing.

Plus, 10% of what you decide to pay will go to one of three important charities: Child’s Play, the World Wildlife Fund, or Creative Commons. These particular charities have been chosen because of the immense contribution they have made to the betterment of humanity around the globe.  Read on to explore the benefits of purchasing a Pay What You Want bundle at Cult of Mac Deals.

This week: Why Apple Watch will win the wrist war, we snap a pic with Patrick Stewart but he’s not amused, the good and bad of a George Lucas-free Star Wars 7, Microsoft’s new HoloLens looks incredible, and we reveal some of our favorite apps and gear on an all-new Under Review.

Our thanks to Automatic for supporting this episode. Plug Automatic into your car’s data port, and their beautiful app will show you where you parked, learn how to save fuel with tips based on your actual driving, and even diagnose and turn off your car’s check engine light.

Full show notes after the click.

Don’t miss out on the many exciting deals on gadgets, software, and more that are expiring very soon at Cult of Mac Deals.

Of particular note, this is your final opportunity to get the world’s smallest quadcopter, the popular SKEYE Nano Drone.  Don’t wait any longer to get this bad boy.  Order today before it’s gone.

Although it’s a Windows game, I’ve never met anyone without a sweet spot for Minesweeper, the addictive little puzzle game that Microsoft debuted in Windows 3.1. Sadly, though, it never came to the Mac.

But if you love a good game of Minesweeper, we’ve got some great news. You can now play it right within Notification Center. Better act on it soon, though: Apple has a tendency to pull interesting iOS 8 widgets like this one.

The Apple Watch might be Cupertino’s most hotly anticipated product, but for my money, the two releases I’m most excited about this year are the 12-inch MacBook Air and the 12-inch iPad Pro. Outside of a few leaked images, though, we still have not seen either of these rumored devices in the flash.

Conceptual designer Martin Hajek is no stranger to turning rumors of upcoming Apple products into blisteringly sexy 3-D renders, and now he’s done it again with a series of renders showing the iPad Pro and 12-inch MacBook Air going head to head. Call it the battle of the 12-inchers, if you will!

A weird bug in iOS 8’s Calendar app has been making people pull their hair out for months. When adding events using either a Google or Microsoft Exchange server, the time zone is randomly synced to Greenwich Mean Time.

Complaints started surfacing around iOS 8’s release last September, and the issue still persists.

Apple enjoyed historic sales this holiday season, and while the company won’t reveal its official earnings until January 27th, based on the latest smartphone activation report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, Apple dominated the holiday shopping season and accounted for 50% of all smartphone activations in Q4 2014.

Tim Cook is likely to announce another record breaking quarter as Apple nearly doubled the number of activations of its closest competitor Samsung, which accounted for a modest 26% of the market.

Check out the surprising graph below:

We love Sonos speakers here at Cult of Mac. In fact, we can barely make it through our Faves and Raves segment on the CultCast without Leander waxing poetic for the sleek wireless speakers.

The company just teamed up with Bruce Mau Design to create a new psychedelic logo that’s nearly as entertaining their HiFi systems that let you beam sound to any room in your house. If you scroll up and down the page you’ll notice a pulsing effect on the logo, similar to a bass thumping speaker.

There’s no mention on Bruce Mau Design’s website as to whether the optical illusion is intentional. If not it’s an awesome accident. Go ahead and wiggle the page up and down to experience the the visual effect yourself.

Via: BrandNew

I launched SimCity: Complete Edition last night at around 8 p.m. I played around with my new city, getting a feel for the controls, zoning for residences, commercial ventures and industrial centers.

I zoomed in and out to get up-close and bird’s-eye views of my own private Idaho (well, Squifton, if we’re being literal). I checked out the various data views, gave my city police buildings and power, water and fire departments. I added parks, more residential areas, roads and even created a neighboring city — a sleepy little hamlet that purchases power and water from the main city. Just a quick little foray into a game that I’ve been itching to play.

When I glanced up at the clock, it was three hours later.

Home entertainment systems are more complex than ever, often consisting of several audio visual components all tied into one another and each having its own remote control. That means constantly looking for lost remotes, changing dead batteries, and dealing with remote control confusion.

Now you can replace all your individual remotes and easily control your entire home entertainment system from your smartphone or tablet with the Blumoo Bluetooth Universal Remote, available at Cult of Mac Deals at a heavily discounted price.

At $99 a year, Amazon Prime is a killer deal — especially if you do a lot of online shopping. But it’s going to get even better tomorrow, January 24, when you’ll be able to bag a one-year subscription for just $72 — more than 25% off — to celebrate the Golden Globe Awards.

iPhoto is a free download for everyone these days, making it a basic bit of kit for anyone dealing with the deluge of photographic data we seem to collect. Still, it’s often overlooked by the best of us because of its limitations.

That’s unfortunate, because the simple program offers some pretty useful features that can quickly let you get on with enjoying your photos rather than tweaking them.

Here are five simple tips for using Apple’s built-in photo “shoebox,” letting you make your photos better and more organized even more quickly.

Artists don’t always explain themselves well.

Even acclaimed illustrator Christoph Niemann, who can articulate the mysteries of creativity better than many, doesn’t always understand the moment when the head, heart and eyes merge with skills and gifts to produce a brilliant piece. It’s like trying to put into words the act of breathing.

But every Sunday, we can behold the headwaters of his creative flow.

Fresh off his deep dive into CES, Alex takes on home automation and how HomeKit may just change everything, making the dream of an easy, ubiquitous home future a reality. Rob takes a look at a new game that turns your Apple TV into a motion-controlled gaming console, Buster shows us how the Apple Watch has already won the war for your wrist, Luke builds his own fun with a shoebox full of maker-kit for kid-friendly iPad gadgets, and Lewis spends a little time in Microsoft’s holographic future.

We’ve got all this and more in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine, so make sure to subscribe and download your copy today.

With their rise, fall and ascent to global cultural dominance, Apple and LEGO are not entirely dissimilar as brands. I’m not sure whether their similar philosophies toward business have any bearing on my appreciation for both companies, but I do know that I absolutely loved last year’s LEGO Movie.

Having recently been robbed of an Oscar nom, fellow LEGO Movie fans can at least get some of their brick-fix today thanks to the news that The LEGO Movie Video Game has arrived on iOS — giving you a chance to play what is a very fun game on your iPhone or iPad.

Not all of us work 9 to 5’s. My wife, for example, works all sorts of shifts, working around her school schedule: 8:30 – 5:30 one day, then 1:30 to 9:30 the next. And as a guy who spends the better part of each day glued to a computer just two rooms away from his bed, it can be pretty hard to keep track just when she’s working, and when I can next expect to see her.

Shifts is an app that solves all that. A calendar app specifically designed for people who either work retail jobs, or otherwise have constantly shifting work schedules, it’s an ingenious little app that makes managing your weekly shifts -— and keeping your partner informed of them — a snap.

You may may never be able to listen to Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes live in the Star Wars cantina for yourself, but here’s the next best thing: a turntable modeled after Han Solo’s famous parsec-shattering ship, the Millennium Falcon.

New photos leaked online apparently show the display portion of the forthcoming, eagerly-anticipated 12-inch MacBook Air: a device rumored to be Apple’s first Retina MacBook Air model.

In the photos, the display is compared in size to various current Apple devices, including existing MacBook models and the iPad Air 2.

Personally, I can’t wait for it! Feast your eyes on some of the other photos after the jump: