Critics are fond of saying Apple doesn’t innovate any more. But Apple’s new electronic payment system, Apple Pay, is innovation of the highest order. After a relatively smooth rollout this week, I honestly believe Apple Pay is the future of payments.

Even so, Apple Pay must clear some big hurdles if it’s to become the universal standard. For now, it’s limited to Apple’s latest iPhones and a relatively small number of retail partners, but the basic system — using your fingerprint to validate a purchase on your mobile phone — is the way we will pay for goods and services in the future.

Once again, Apple has shown the world how things should be done.

Nest has acquired Revolv, the Colarado-based startup which allowed users to control their smart home devices from a single interface using their smartphone.

No price has yet been announced for the purchase, which follows Nest’s $555 million Dropcam purchase back in June, and Nest’s own acquisition by Google for a massive $3.2 billion earlier this year.

Italian firearm maker Beretta has enlisted Apple’s new design guru, Marc Newson, to create a hunting double-barreled shotgun.

Newson has created a custom version of the classic double-barrelled 486 Parallelo shotgun for Beretta, which will be officially unveiled at an event in London on November 13th.

The Apple SIM in the iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3 is based on an awesome idea—who doesn’t want to switch carriers with a tap of the screen? But the actual utility of the Apple SIM is pretty muddled, as evidenced by AT&T locking the SIM to its network.

Tired of the same old boring pitch that flight attendants have to give you in accordance with FAA regulations? Well, Air New Zealand decided to make its own briefing a lot more epic in the latest video for the official airline of Middle Earth stand-in country.

Watch as Elijah Wood and other cast members grace this light-hearted, good natured air safety briefing, complete with fake Gandalf explaining how to position yourself in the event of a crash landing.

In the past, using the Messages app on a Mac could be an irritating experience. And what if a friend dared to send a green-bubble text from an Android phone? When texting from your Mac, messaging those friends wasn’t possible until now.

In today’s Cult of Mac video, find out how to enable Text Message Forwarding between your iPhone and Mac. With iOS 8.1 and Yosemite installed, enjoying this seamless feature is just a few short taps and clicks away. Find out how to do it all in this speedy tutorial.

Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV to catch all our latest videos.

Ralph Nader has a message for Tim Cook: Stop listening to Carl Icahn.

In a scathing letter to Cook published in today’s Wall Street Journal, the former presidential candidate takes Apple’s CEO to task for bending to the will of billionaire investor Icahn and issuing more stock buybacks, rather than listening to its workers and addressing the horrendous working conditions at its factories in China.

Nader’s letter proposes Foxconn workers’ hours be cut to 40 a week and their pay doubled, which would only cost Apple an extra $5.4 billion annually.

Apple revolutionized the music industry with the introduction of iTunes in 2003, but even Cupertino is having trouble selling albums these days.

iTunes revenue dropped 13% over the last year reports the Wall Street Journal, marking the second straight year that Apple’s digital music sales have declined, after falling 5.7% in 2013.

Amazon added Apple Pay support today for its Amazon.com Rewards Visa.

Since Chase, the Amazon rewards card issuer, was an Apple Pay launch partner, some speculated that Amazon intentionally opted out of Apple’s mobile payments system. But Amazon quickly confirmed this week that it was working on adding support for its credit card in the near future. Now it’s followed through.

Apple will be holding on to its top executives until at least 2019, if the granting of new stock options by the Apple board has anything to do with it.

Angela Ahrendts, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi, CFO Luca Maestri, VP of hardware engineering Daniel Riccio, lawyer Bruce Sewell and COO Jeffrey Williams all received stock grants potentially valued at a total of $27 million, based on the high closing price of AAPL stock Thursday.

Incandescent light bulbs are inefficient, last only a couple of years, and can emit light in one color only. It’s about time we brought interior lighting into the 21st century.

Today, people expect more from their interior lighting options. Those people use the ilumi LED Smartbulb, available at the discounted price of $79 at Cult of Mac Deals for a limited time.

If you haven’t already picked up Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series on Android and iOS, you’re missing out on some of the best console games ever brought to mobile. But now’s your chance to get them super cheap, which GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas all reduced to celebrate the latter’s 10th anniversary.

Tim Cook has described his desire to bring Apple Pay to China as “top of the list” in terms of priorities.

Cook was quoted on Friday, following an interview he gave with China’s official Xinhua news agency. “China is a really key market for us,” he said. “Everything we do [in terms of services in the U.S.], we are going to work it here.”

Christian Bale is Steve Jobs. The Oscar-winning actor has officially signed on to play the late Apple co-founder in Sony’s upcoming movie based on Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay. Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle is attached to the project, but no other cast or crew members have been confirmed.

A lot of big Hollywood actors, including Leonardo DiCaprio, have been in talks to play Jobs at some point, but Bale’s name stayed in the hat till the very end. Looking at Bale as an actor, it’s easy to see why. Here’s why he will play the perfect Steve Jobs.

When the Apple Watch is released next year, it’s going to represent a major paradigm shift for iOS: it’ll be an interface made up of fingertip-sized bubbles, not rounded square icons.

Don’t you think that calls for a new logo to mark the occasion?

If you’re looking for a fun puzzle game to play over the weekend you can do a whole lot worse than RGB Express, Apple’s “App of the Week” which has gone free in the App Store.

Arriving on iOS one month ago, the game is a charming strategy title in which you play the route planner for a fleet of trucks, responsible for plotting their paths through increasingly complex neighborhoods, always ensuring that every home receives its package.

Starting off simply but getting increasingly complex as the game goes on, it’s an entertaining challenge, spanning 200 levels in all, that’s sure to appeal to the kind of iOS gamers who also enjoy titles like Blek.

Yes! Another week, another scintillating issue full of Cult of Mac’s best news stories and features, compiled in one place to read through easily on your iPad or iPhone. This week we’ve got some delightful coverage of the new Apple Pay features in iOS 8, tips and tricks on the latest operating systems, iOS 8.1 and OS X Yosemite, and a couple of great apps you won’t want to miss. That and more in this week’s spectacularly useful Cult of Mac Magazine.

Dig into Cult of Mac Magazine October 24 Edition, Free on iTunes

Tim Cook may be the Apple CEO we picture when we think of the mission to make Apple a “force for good” in the world, including enhanced accessibility for deaf users. But Steve Jobs was the person who first got the ball rolling.

During the Tampa Bay Business 100 awards last night — an event dedicated to honoring the 100 largest private companies in Tampa Bay, Florida — the CEO of a company which makes Internet video communication tools recalled how Jobs helped him use the so-called ZVRS technology with FaceTime.

Well, here’s one for the record books. Apple just rejected a developer’s app for violating its policies against pornographic content.

Nothing weird about that, except for the way that Apple went about it: by sending that developer pictures of a dude masturbating. What?

Continuity is one of the best features of iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, allowing your iPhone, iPad, and Mac to all operate more seamlessly together than ever before. But there’s a problem: Continuity requires Bluetooth 4.0 LE to work, and many older Macs don’t have it.

But don’t despair. A new tool has been released makes it possible to easily hacktivate Continuity, even if Apple doesn’t want you to.

Third-party keyboards like SwiftKey and Swype vastly improve touchscreen typing in iOS 8, but sometimes you need to go that extra mile to really express yourself. Sometimes you need to send text messages in Klingon, or get your point across visually with an animated GIF or an off-the-cuff doodle.

Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, showcased a Klingon Keyboard during last week’s iPad media event, and that’s just one of the amusingly offbeat keyboards flooding the App Store in this new era of freedom.

Cult of Mac talked with the developers behind the Klingon Keyboard and other wacky alternatives for this guide to the weird world of third-party iOS keyboards. You’ll never type the same way again!

Unlike every other major smartphone company, Apple launches new flagship iPhones just once a year, meaning that whenever a customer buys a new iPhone around release time they can rest safe in the knowledge that their device is going to remain current for a whole twelve months.

Seeing the kind of success Apple has had with this model, Song Mobile has reportedly gone back to the Xerox machine drawing board, and decided to scrap their own twice-yearly policy of refreshing its flagship Xperia phone in favor an Apple-style annual overhaul.

During its earnings call yesterday Amazon gave some clues about just how spectacularly its Fire Phone business is tanking — making it seem one of the worst tech ideas since the RMS Titanic shipped without lifeboats.

How bad are we talking? At the end of its disappointing third-quarter the company still has a massive $83 million worth of unsold inventory sitting around.

It’s now taking a $170 million charge “primarily related to Fire phone inventory valuation and supplier commitment costs.”

If you are the proud owner of a new iPhone 6 or 6+, you are going to want to protect it so it will work like new for years to come. But most cases that really protect your iPhone cost more than they should. And, let’s face it, while those expensive cases protect well, they don’t exactly have a lot of style.

Now you can provide your new iPhone 6/6+ with real protection without skimping on style with The Retro Classics Nintendo & Gameboy iPhone 6/6+ Cases for a paltry $14 at Cult of Mac Deals.