Star Trek Captains Picard and Kirk could talk to any alien, no matter how different it was from humanity, thanks to the universal translator, a magical sci-fi device that explained away why strange civilizations in far-away solar systems all spoke English.

That future just got a little less far-fetched, thanks to Skype Translator, a new preview service that uses technology from Microsoft Research to translate two different languages back and forth in real time.

This is heady stuff, as school kids in Seattle and Mexico City seem to instantly recognize when they chat back and forth in English and Spanish via the Skype service in the video below.

Xiaomi has quickly become the world’s third most popular smartphone maker, but according to a 2013 financial filing released by the privately held company, it doesn’t pay to copy your way to the top.

In 2013 Xiaomi made a meager $51 million in profit even though it’s valued at more than $10 billion by investors.  The filing reveals Xiaomi’s low profits are on account of the No. 3 smartphone maker’s razor-thin margins. It brought in about $4.2 billion in revenue in 2013, giving the company an operating margin of just 1.8 percent.

Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak revolutionized the computer world with the invention of the Apple II, but back in 1977 when they created the unbelievably simple home PC, few people realized the enormous impact it would have on the “small computer field.”

Case in point, look at this article from the Homestead High School newspaper talking about its alumnus’ new company Apple Computers, in a ‘aww isn’t that cute, they sold 200 computers’ sort of way. The article above was published in the The Epitaph on May 20th, 1977, just a few weeks before the first Apple II units went on sale, and went on to become the first computer to sell 1 million units.

At the time of publication Apple had just moved out of the garage and into an office in Cupertino with eight total employees. One of Apple’s first employees, Chris Espinosa was still in high school at the time and was interviewed by the paper for the article on Jobs and Woz’s new company. Along with revealing that you used to be able to get Apple’s top software engineer to build you a custom app to do whatever you want, the high school junior presaged the idea of a Genius Bar, decades before the first Apple Store opened.

You can read the full article below:

What do you get for the Apple nut in your life? You know the type. They live and breathe Apple — but they already have every Apple product under the sun. Plus all the accessories.

iPod? Got it. iPhone wallet case? Got it. Steve Jobs bobblehead? Got it.

Well, I’ll bet a testicle they don’t have some of this stuff.

How to become the highest paid musician of the year: profit from a multi-billion dollar buyout of your company.

That’s the lesson to be learned from Forbes Magazine’s tally of the top paid musicians of 2014. Dr. Dre, or just “Dre” as he’s affectionately referred to by Tim Cook, amassed a whopping $620 million before taxes this year, giving him “the biggest single-year payday of any musician in history.”

Apple is back with a new tearjerker of a Christmas ad, entitled “The Song.” Like last year’s Emmy-winning TV spot for the holidays, the company has chosen to showcase how its products make people feel, rather than what they do.

This time around, a young musician uses Garageband on her Mac to make a song for her grandmother. Expect to start seeing this on TV quite a bit over the next couple of weeks.

There’s value at Cult of Mac Deals every day where a wide selection of tech and tech related products are available to suit every taste.

Today we put a spotlight on 5 particular deals because they are timely, interesting, and hold an astonishing amount of value. Check out The Limited Edition Code Black Aerial Drone with Camera, the iOS 8 Game Hacker Bundle, the Striiv Fusion, learn to Build iOS Apps With Swift, and the Afterburner iPhone 6 Battery Case.

This week: the Sony hack reveals all sorts of juicy Jobs movie tidbits; HBO uses Game of Thrones to break big cable’s iron grip; iPod Classic prices skyrocket as fans scramble to buy them; we’ll tell you how to get some fantastic iOS games absolutely free; and then we pitch our favorite tech and vote on which is best… it’s an all new Faves ’N Raves.

Our thanks to lynda.com for sponsoring this episode! Learn virtually any application at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at lynda.com.

Click on for the show notes.

If you bought a Mac from 2013 on, you can download the iWork suite of apps — Pages, Keynote and Numbers — from the Mac App Store absolutely free. But what if you bought an older Mac? You have to pay, and they’re expensive, running $19.99 each.

Thankfully, there’s a trick you can use to download iWork apps from the App Store for free. Here’s how.

We all know that cats love playing with iPads. It turns out they’re not the only ones: the penguins at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California love playing with iPads so much it can help them get pregnant.

We never cease to be amazed at all the amazing DIY projects that Mac fans do with old Apple hardware. Case in point: see this vintage Apple Extended Keyboard? It’s not hooked to a computer. It is a computer, thanks to the embedded Rapsberry Pi inside.

It’s the holiday season, and every buck counts. So if you’re in the market for an iPhone to put under the tree, here’s a great reason to head over to Walmart: they’re slashing prices on the iPhone this weekend.

We all like wearing cool clothes and accessories, and some prudish police officers actually insist that we do. And if you’re conscious of your duds’ impact on the environment or history, you want to make sure that the stuff that makes you look good will also make you feel good about where it came from.

Here are three neat Kickstarter projects from companies with that in mind. This is where I was going to make a joke about “wearing your eco-friendliness on your sleeve,” but one of these projects is for shoes.

If you are a graphic or web designer, chances are you spend a lot of your time working with Photoshop. And, why not? It is, hands down, the most popular and feature-rich photo editing and graphic design suite in use today. That explains why so many professionals use it as their graphic design software of choice.

Now you can make Photoshop even better. For a limited time at Cult of Mac Deals, purchase The Premium Photoshop Add-On Bundle at a remarkable discount of 93% for a final price of just $39!

If you needed any more confirmation that Windows Phone is dead in the water, two of its most high profile supporters have abandoned it for the iPhone.

Veteran Microsoft journalists Ed Bott and Tom Warren both published essays this week in which they criticized Windows Phone for its shortcomings and announced that they’ve stopped using Windows Phones personally. Citing a lack of carrier and third-party app support, both agreed that Windows Phone has missed its shot at being a real competitor in the smartphone market.

Apple scooped up a couple architectural awards this week for the stunning engineering behind its magnificent Glass Lantern store at the Zorlu Center in Istanbul Turkey.  The judges said it ‘takes structural glass technology to a new dimension’, and even though we’ve never been inside the Zorlu store it’s not hard to see why it’s getting showered with awards after looking at these pictures.

The Zorlu Store is the first Apple Store created by the same architectural firm behind the new spaceship campus in Cupertino, and it looks like the same amount of attention to detail and minimalist thought that goes into the creation of an iPhone was also poured into the new award-winning Apple temple.

Take a tour of the exquisite store below:

BlackBerry is today rolling out a new BBM update across all platforms, but it’s the users on Android and iOS who will enjoy its biggest changes. In addition to support for stickers in group chat and improvements to the timed messages function, this release brings a brand new look to iOS and compatibility with Lollipop on Android.

We’ll admit it: we were all squeeing like fanboys when we saw the official trailer for the upcoming sequel, Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

We may have watched it quite a bit more than once, but the YouTubers below have taken their fandom to another level, with some really well crafted remixes of the official short film.

Check out trailers below starring the cast of (and scenes directly from) the original trilogy, the trailer as Wes Anderson would do it, and a bizarre rendering of it all with pets in place of human actors. Oh, and there’s also the obligatory Lego version, as well, so be sure to scroll all the way down.

Apple’s splash into home automation with addition of HomeKit to iOS 8 is expected to have a huge impact on sales of smart home devices in 2015 according to a Park Associates report that found 37% of U.S. households plan to purchase one or more devices next year.

The rising popularity in smart home device sales has been aided by both Apple and Google introducing new solutions in 2014. The research firm discovered retailers are getting ready for smart home devices to hit the mainstream by expanding shelf space for items like Nest thermometers, Philips Hue bulbs, smart door locks and other items.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to make a music video, and maybe you shouldn’t be. Turns out, rocket scientists can’t dance.
NASA released a parody video on YouTube Thursday called “All About That Space,” designed to raise excitement about Orion’s recent first test flight.

The lyrics of Meghan Trainor’s monster hit “All About That Bass” were re-engineered by the Pathways Interns of NASA’s Johnson Space Center to lead the viewer on a behind-the-scenes look at the men and woman hard at work on space travel.

A long-awaited WhatsApp client for desktops could finally be on its way to your web browser. References to a “WhatsApp Web” app have been discovered inside an APK package for Android, less than a week after WhatsApp allegedly tried to poach a web developer from a rival messaging company.

Apple has won another architectural award for the innovative glass engineering used to create its impossibly perfect glass lantern store in Istanbul, Turkey.

The Apple Store at the Zorlu Center in Turkey took home the Supreme award for structural engineering excellence from this year’s Structural Awards, and was also honored for its excellence in structural design for a retail building.

As promised — and after a tiny storm of controversy over Apple’s initial rejection of the app over so-called pornographic content — the award-winning dystopian document thriller Papers, Please is now available for iOS.

Speculation about who is going to build Apple’s A9 processor may be coming to a halt, as Korea’s Electronic Times reports today that not only has Samsung won the contract from Apple, but it’s also entered production.

As per the report, Samsung began fabrication on the new system-on-chip yesterday at its chipmaking facility in Austin, Texas, using a 14 nanometer process.