Apple finally showed the world today what the media has been calling an “iWatch” for months. Apple Watch is the first new product category to come out of the company since the original iPad. It marks a “new era” for Apple, according to Tim Cook, and introducing it was even worthy of the “One more thing” tease made famous by Steve Jobs.

There’s a lot to digest about Apple’s first wearable, so we’ve made it easy for you. Here are the 10 most important things you need to know about the Apple Watch:

Sony added the Xperia Z3 and the Xperia Z3 Compact to its smartphone lineup at IFA last week, and they’re the best devices the Japanese company has built so far. But are they good enough to take on Apple’s new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus? Can a water-resistant form factor and PS4 Remote Play beat Touch ID and Cupertino’s speedy A8 processor?

Find out how the latest flagships from Apple and Sony stack up against each other below.

Apple’s new iPhones are a big improvement over their predecessors in almost every way. Both the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus pack the larger, sharper displays loyal users have been begging for, as well as a faster A8 processor, twice as much RAM, and improved iSight cameras.

But how does the iPhone 6 stack up against the latest devices from Samsung? Check out our comparison below to see if Apple’s new baby has what it takes to beat the Galaxy S5 and the Galaxy Note 4 in a specifications smackdown.

We finally know all the detail of the iPhone 6, but there’s just one question remaining: Which one are you going to get? The iPhone 6 has all the features of its bigger brother, but is your pocket jonesing for the iPhone 6 Plus and its monstrous 5.5-inch screen?

Pre-orders don’t start until September 12th, but you can vote in our poll above and drop the reasons for your choice in the comments below while you wait for iPhone 6 launch day on September 19th.

The iWatch is no longer a unicorn.

Apple finally unveiled its wearable device today — dubbed the “Apple Watch” — and Cult of Mac was there to get a hands-on look at the highly customizable smartwatch.

That like-new iPhone 5s in your pocket? Obsolete. How about that smartwatch or fitness band you’ve been carting around on your wrist for the past six months? Old news. If you whip out your leather wallet and try to pay with a rectangle of plastic — at least at the corporate stores Apple works with — chances are you’ll be looked at like an old fogey.

Apple has, once again, thoroughly owned the mobile category, expanding the ways we communicate, live and transact business in our daily lives.

This domination of the smartphone, smartwatch and mobile payment categories, as revealed in today’s big iPhone 6 and Apple Watch event, has us ready to hand over another load of cash to the Apple mothership, and gladly. As usual, there were some surprises — some awesome and some not so much — but here are the main takeaways.

Tim Cook and company brought down the house at the Flint Center in Cupertino, and while investors haven’t reacted positively, Apple fanboys are still trying to recover from the hurricane of incredible new products Apple just announced.

The Apple Watch, big iPhones, Apple Pay and even some new software features were previewed at Apple’s first fashion-forward event. But there were a couple of disappointments hiding in the dark corners of the Flint Center as well. Like, where was the talk about the Apple Watch’s battery life? And why is there no sapphire glass on the iPhone 6?

Here are the biggest disappointments from today’s Apple keynote:

The new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus have bigger screens, badder cameras and you can use them in place of your wallet.

Apple just took the wraps off Apple Pay, its much-rumored mobile payments service. CEO Tim Cook is so excited about it that he looped the demo over and over during the keynote. It’s being touted as an “easy, secure and private” way to get your caffe latte on the run.

One thing’s for sure: this is a massive shift in the payments industry.

The iPod Classic is dead.

After serving faithfully in the iPod lineup since 2009, the iPod Classic and its iconic click-wheel interface have finally gotten the ax. Along with redesigning the Apple website and adding an Apple Watch page, Apple has removed the iPod Classic from the iPod section of its site.

We knew this day was coming for years, and what better way to give the old iPod the boot than right as the sexy new smartwatch is walking through the doors at Apple’s campus.

Fare thee well, oh click wheel. Fare thee well.

All the finishing touches have been added to iOS 8 ahead of its release later this month, leading Apple to seed the final GM beta to developers.

iOS 8 GM is now available to developers in the iOS Dev Center with the public release slated for September 17th, 2014 – two days before the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus hit Apple Store shelves. The new mobile operating system will be made available to iOS users for free, and is compatible with the iPhone 4s and greater, as well as the iPad 2 and greater.

Apple’s live broadcast of today’s keynote was one of the worst of all-time, but if you didn’t catch all the detail of the Apple Watch you can now head to Apple.com/watch to learn all the deets on Apple’s new wearable.

Apple Watch doesn’t launch until 2015 and there’s still no word on battery life, or how much the high end models will cost, but for now you can drool over its Sapphire display and six different wrist straps.

Along with the new Apple Watch page, the website has been redesigned with a sleek new menu bar that’s just as flat as iOS 7 and 8. The website is also responsive with a new mobile view on iPhone and iPad. Promotional pages for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are also available, but the Apple Store is still offline.

Apple just released U2’s new album, free to all iTunes users, onstage at the Flint Center in Cupertino this morning at the end of Apple Event.

After the two hour event, which unveiled both the new iPhone 6 models and the highly anticipated Apple Watch, Tim Cook introduced “one of the best artists of all time.”

U2 took the stage at the Flint Center in California and rocked the crowd of tech and fashion journalists. Then the two celebrities, one tech and one rock, released the new U2 album Songs of Innocence exclusively to iTunes through October 13 of this year.

As expected, the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus offer more screen space, with 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch screens respectively.

The exciting thing?

Apple has pulled off a major engineering miracle: they’re also thinner, faster and smarter than their older cousins — and you don’t have to be richer to get your hands on one. You’ll also be able to use these phones as wallets and health trackers, marking a huge advance in how smart our phones really are.

When Tim Cook started off the keynote by saying “Today, we are pleased to announce the biggest advancement in iPhone,” we were slightly wary of the hyperbole as journalists should be. But after getting a good look at the two new iPhones, we couldn’t agree with him more.

You know that feeling you get when you buy a fresh piece of tech? You hurry out of the store, race home with whatever you’ve bought, and feverishly unbox your newest acquisition and revel in its glory. It’s a pretty awesome feeling. Do you know what feels even better than that? Winning fresh tech in a contest!

Right now you can have that winning feeling by entering the The Rebel Photographer Giveaway and The 11 inch MacBook Air Giveaway at Cult of Mac Deals.

Today Apple unveils the iPhone 6 and mythical iWatch, and Cult of Mac is on the ground in Cupertino, enthusiastically reporting all the action from The Flint Center. Leander will be at the event, elbowing his way to the front of the line for the keynote and hands-on sessions.

This liveblog post is where we’ll cover all the announcements and festivities in Cupertino. We’ll have full updates, analysis and entertainment—everything you could possibly want to know about Apple’s newest, most magical devices.

The event kicks off at 10 a.m. Pacific, but we’ll be firing up the liveblog hours before to give you details from ground zero. What mysteries await us inside Apple’s mysterious white box? You’ll have to come back and find out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gwoLjYIeIw

Available in many major cities, Zipcar is this wonderful service that allows you to rent a car by the hour with your smartphone. In my neighborhood, there are half-a-dozen Zipcars parked, just waiting to be scooped up for a quick Ikea run or jaunt to the grocery store. It makes owning a car largely superfluous, at least if you live in a city with good public transportation.

But even though I live in an area with a lot of Zipcars, it’s still hard to find one that is unused on a busy Saturday or Sunday afternoon. But now Verizon has a plan on how to compete with Zipcar, and it’s a doozy: they’re going to allow anyone turn their own car into a Zipcar, rentable by iPhone or other smartphones.

Today, in what is being described as a “historic” event, Apple will take the stage in Cupertino and unveil at least three new products: the 4.7-inch iPhone 6, the 5.5-inch iPhone 6+, and (quite possibly) the iWatch, Apple’s revolutionary wearable.

But imagine if Apple had even more in store for us. Like what? Oh, say, this Apple patent for an Occulus Rift style virtual reality headset!

Just when you thought you’d heard everything, allow me to introduce the “Selfie Brush.”

There have been plenty of wacky phone cases over the iPhone’s lifespan, but until now the idea of crossing an iPhone with a hairbrush remained the stuff of mad scientists. Until now.

Appearing shortly before the long-awaited iPhone 6 announcement, the Selfie Brush iPhone case is designed to (no surprise here!) helps its users take better selfies by tidying themselves up beforehand for “professional results.”

The Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic is set to be at Apple’s special media event this morning to help demonstrate the benefit of Apple’s Health app to medical professionals, according to the Star Tribune.

Mayo Clinic is one of the best-known names in U.S. healthcare and partnering with Apple will benefit both organizations: Apple with legitimacy for its new mobile health push, and Mayo Clinic in terms of using technology to better provide health and fitness tracking for patients.

As per the Star Tribune, Mayo Clinic’s role at Apple’s event will involve demonstrating how data can flow into the more sophisticated management system of a major health center.

We’re mere hours away from Apple’s September 9th special media event at The Flint Center, and as expected, the company has added an “Apple Events” channel for those planning to watch on the Apple TV.

Fans without an Apple TV can watch a livestream of the event on Apple’s website, provided they are running Safari 5.1.10 or later on OS X 16.6.8 or later.

The event kicks off at 10 a.m. Pacific today, and we expect to see the public unveiling of both the iPhone 6 and iWatch.

Cult of Mac will be covering the event live from the Flint Center, so stay tuned for our moment-by-moment coverage. It’s going to be a blast!

Apple is widely rumored to unveil a new NFC-based mobile payments service tied into the iPhone and iWatch later today.

But there’s a problem. In the aftermath of the Fappening, the massive iCloud breach that leaked nude and pornographic images of Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and more, it’s bad timing. Apple’s name is synonymous in the news with security breaches right now. People may not want to trust the company with their financial data if Apple can’t even protect the nudes of celebrities.

So maybe Apple shouldn’t push payments during today’s big event. Or at least not at first. Maybe Tim Cook should apologize instead.

With Apple set to unveil the eagerly-anticipated iPhone 6 later today, that can only mean one thing: that the public launch of iOS 8 isn’t far away. And chances are that OS X Yosemite’s not too far behind it, either.

As both of Apple’s operating systems are set for a refresh, Chitika Insights has run the numbers to examine iOS and OS X version distributions at this exciting juncture for Apple: sampling tens of millions of U.S. and Canadian online ad impressions running through the Chitika Ad Network.

The numbers, catalogued between August 25 and 31, show that a massive 90 percent of North American iOS Web traffic comes from devices running iOS 7, largely thanks to Apple’s update strategy of directly prompting eligible users to upgrade.

Fans have been clamouring for an iOS port of the later Final Fantasy games for years, but it looks as though publisher Square Enix is set to go one step further — announcing that not only will some of these titles soon be making their way to mobile, but also that the company behind them is experimenting with a new cloud-based mobile streaming service called Dive In.

Dive In is set to debut October 9 with an initial offering of three games, including Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 13 and The Cherry Blossom Murders.

The only problem? You guessed it: currently the service is only available in Japan.

Martin Hajek has developed a recipe of sorts for crafting stunning 3-D renderings of future Apple products that get shared around the Web and even used in advertisements while the world awaits the Cupertino company’s big reveal.

“My inspiration comes from real-life Apple products, combined with a good dose of internet rumors, a dash of common sense and imagination sprinkled on top,” the 39-year-old told Cult of Mac. “What I do is quite simply ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ — with the giants in question being Jony Ive and his design team.”

Apple’s secrecy surrounding its upcoming products is legendary (notwithstanding one memorable breach by the Pentagon). Everyone wants to know what insanely great products Apple has up its sleeve, so the company goes to great lengths to protect its secrets. Workers prepping for today’s big event have had their phone cameras plugged with tamperproof tape so they can’t leak anything spied before Tim Cook takes the stage.

With just under five hours to go before Apple kicks off its iPhone event, the Apple Online Store is now offline in preparation for new products. When it returns, you can expect to see two new iPhones and a brand new wearable decorating its pages.