One of the many, many things that Apple does right is trackpads. Not only is the trackpad hardware that Apple uses in the MacBook lineup the best in the world (seriously, I’ve never used a non-Apple trackpad that even came close), but the software backing it up is world-class.

A lot of that has to do with the library of consistent trackpad gestures Apple has built into OS X over the years. Compared to OS X, Windows feels downright schizophrenic when you’re using gestures. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. But it now appears that Microsoft is putting an end to the trackpad schizophrenia by borrowing Apple’s approach to gestures.

If you’re looking for a good keyboard for your iPad Air 2, Logitech has just announced three new beauties, including a pair of sleek keyboard cases.

Whether you’re a Mac novice or a seasoned veteran, there are a ton of tips and ticks out there for mastering OS X Yosemite. In Part 2 of our Yosemite tip series, we gather more of the very best.

The top awards for the 50th Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards have been announced at London’s Natural History Museum. More than 42,000 entries from 96 countries were submitted this year, making it the biggest event in the history of the awards.

There were many incredible entries, but the one that really grabbed us was the beautiful photo you see above, taken by Marsel Van Oosten, an extraordinarily talented photographer from the Netherlands. It shows a Japanese monkey submerged in water, using an iPhone.

A patent published today shows that Apple is investigating new halogen free, flame-retardant materials for use in its devices.

According to Apple, only about 12% of plastics currently contain flame retardants. An increased use of such materials would improve the safety of electrical wiring and electronic devices, and help reduce the number of fires caused by electronic devices as a result.

Halogenated flame retardants have been found to be effective in many plastics, but these are increasingly regulated as a result of environmental concerns. Since sustainability is a big topic for Apple, the company therefore wanted to discover a material that would possess similar fire-retardant qualities, while also not being damaging to the environment.

Tuesday’s patent describes a material with these qualities, that also produces only negligible amounts of toxic substances while burning. As per Apple, the material could be used in devices including the iMac, MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPad.

I consider myself to be “the adventurous type” but I’ve never once kayaked, thanks to two big hurdles: I live in the desert, and I drive a tiny Fiat that barely fits four grown humans in its cramped interior.

Water activities in these parts of Arizona require a gas-guzzling truck and a garage big enough to store your boats, putting kayaking out of reach for most urban dwellers. Oru Kayak destroys both those necessities with a foldable boat that’s strong enough to take on a lake or river, while also compacting into a box small enough to fit in your closet.

Before the Oru Kayak glided into my life, my go-to outdoor activity was hiking. Point me to a waterfall 15 miles away in the desert and even if that AZ ‘dry heat’ was boiling the tar on the highway, I was totally there. Now that there’s a boat that fits in my car, everything’s changed.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere is one of my favorite people in high tech right now. Not only is he doing a great job of turning T-Mobile business around, but in an industry that’s often dominated by buzzwords and corporate speak, he may just be the most publicly outspoken executive since Steve Jobs.

During Recode’s Code/Mobile event yesterday, Legere took the stage to talk about a few topics key to T-Mobile’s turnaround — and, wouldn’t you know it, the iPhone was mentioned pretty heavily.

Legere mentioned that his explicit instructions upon taking over as T-Mobile CEO was to “get down on your knees” and grovel to get the iPhone on his network, which he finally managed (the deal that is, presumably not the literal grovelling) in April 2013. The strategy apparently paid off, too, since the iPhone now accounts for 20% of the carrier’s smartphone base.

OS X Yosemite’s Mail app is a Mac-crashing memory hog, but that might be good news for Microsoft — it appears from new leaked images that Redmond is readying a special version of Outlook built especially for the new Apple OS X. And Office probably won’t be far behind.

Film monsters are physical manifestations of our fears and anxieties. They represent the dangers of progress; terrifying, real-world diseases; and the darkness that lurks deep inside of the human heart. But mostly, they’re just a hell of a lot of fun.

Cult of Mac’s Halloween roundup of excellent horror movies continues with five of the greatest monster movies ever, riveting tales about inhuman beasties that are here to mess with our cities — and our minds.

(Got extra room in your horror queue? Don’t miss yesterday’s roundup of five horror classics.)

Following on from last week’s expectations-defying earnings call, Apple has filed its annual 10-K report with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, indicating just how rosy things are looking in Cupertino.

Net iPhone sales up up by 12%, with global earnings of $102 billion in 2014 versus $91 billion last year. iMac sales are up by the same 12%, too, with 24 million units sold this year compared to 21.5 million in 2013.

The iTunes Store is doing its bit as well, with a total of $10.2 billion in net sales, up from $9.3 billion in 2013. Apple says that app sales are up, but also acknowledges that this increase is partially offset by a decline in digital music sales.

Are you interested in Inbox, Google’s innovative new attempt to “fix” email, but haven’t gotten an invitation into the beta?

Good news: as long as you have a real-world friend who is already part of Inbox’s invite-only beta, you can easily get in, no invite required. Here’s how.

Tim Cook gave a rare public interview on Monday night at the Wall Street Journal’s new tech conference, WSJD. The Apple CEO touched on a range of topics, including Apple Pay’s success, a big potential partnership, why the iPod classic was discontinued, and more.

Here are the biggest takeaways from Cook’s comments:

You’ve got a great web presence. Now you have to protect it from hackers that want to steal your customers’ information to use for their own personal gain. Don’t let them!

With The White Hat Hacker Bundle, you will learn the skills needed to protect your online presence from those who would do you harm. For a limited time, you can get The White Hat Hacker Bundle at 92% off, just $49, at Cult of Mac Deals.

Banks and credit card companies have been heavily pushing Apple Pay already, but perhaps the biggest gesture of support so far is from Wells Fargo.

In a promotion announced today, Wells Fargo said that it will pay customers up to $20 just for trying Apple Pay.

Tim Cook has spoken out about the need for his home state of Alabama to better address LGBT rights in a speech delivered today at the Alabama Academy of Honor induction, in front of Governor Robert Bentley.

Cook discussed his admiration for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and noted how, “I could never understand why some within our state and nation resisted basic principles of human dignity that were so opposite to the values I had learned growing up in Robertsdale, Alabama in a family that was rich in love and respect.”

He went on to say that, “We were too slow on equality on African-Americans. We were too slow on interracial marriage. And we are still too slow on equality for the LBGT community.”

Alabama remains one of the 18 states without marriage equality.

The user interface for iOS hasn’t changed much since the introduction of ‘iPhone OS’ back in 2007. Sure, Jony Ive has added some tweaks over the last few years, but you still swipe around between rows of tiled icons.

Apple’s UI for the Apple Watch though is radically different that iPhone, with circular app icons on a homescreen that can users can zoom in and out of to find their apps easier, so Lucas Menge decided to take the pretty bubbly design and bring it to the iPhone. The results are pretty amazing and bring an entirely new look to the iPhone homescreen.

Check out the full demo below:

In case the giant bags of candy on prominent display at every store that sells food didn’t tip you off, Halloween is coming up. Some people celebrate by dressing up and going to parties or scoring free sweets from their neighbors, but I prefer to spend my Spooky Night with some tiny bags of sour gummis and a selection of horror movies.

If that sounds like a solid evening to you, this will be a treat. Cult of Mac is recommending 25 movies this week, and we’ve arranged them into themed categories. Today, we’re building up your historical base with some classics.

Indie rock band OK Go has a reputation for doing wild and crazy one-shot videos for it’s new releases, and today’s reveal on NBC’s Today show is no exception.

Check out this insane short film where the band performs its second single “I Won’t Let You Down” from the new album Hungry Ghosts. They chair dance atop Honda UNI-CUBs, “omni-directional driving wheel systems” that are in the development stage. Think sitting-down Segways and you’ll have an idea.

Better yet, check out the video below, filmed in Chiba Prefecture, Japan this past August. And make sure you stay for the final, mind-blowing minute where the shot goes high.

After China, India represents Apple’s next big frontier, with 1.2 billion citizens and a rapidly growing smartphone market, that will have sold approximately 80 million handsets this year.

Which is why it’s great news that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus is proving just as popular there as it is elsewhere in the world, with India’s first shipment of the iPhone 6 selling out in a lightning-fast 72 hours.

At 55,000 units, India’s first iPhone shipment may not have been the biggest one around, but it’s still impressive for a country that is still very much a developing market for high end smartphones. Last year, only 6,000 units of the flagship iPhone 5s were supplied by Apple, which also vanished from shelves very quickly.

As was the case with “Scarfgate” following Apple’s September media event, the special guest appearances by developers can often often be the unintentionally comic highlights of Apple keynotes.

That’s exactly what happened at last Thursday’s otherwise fairly predictable iPad event, when two French developers accidentally titled their montage video app presentation “It’s road trip” instead of the intended “Utah road trip.”

Yes, it’s a minor glitch, that does at least show that all demos take place live, but it was amusing nonetheless — particularly the disgusted face exhibited by the typist, who appears to be inwardly kicking himself over screwing up the presentation.

Apple, however, seems to not have been quite so amused by the glitch, since someone at Cupertino has sprinkled some postproduction magic on the Replay demo, meaning that when you watch the keynote on Apple’s website or the Apple TV app, it now reads “Utah road trip” as was intended.

OS X Yosemite is supposed to make Macs run more efficiently than ever, but some early upgraders have discovered a huge memory leak that causes memory pressure to skyrocket and productivity to drop.

The updated Mail app appears to be the culprit of the memory leak that is triggered whenever multiple files are dragged into an email to be added as attachments. Over 100 hundred users have confirmed the memory leak on Apple’s Support forum with screenshots of Mail hogging up to 24GB of RAM.

iPhone 6 owners have only started using Apple Pay to buy items at local stores, but Apple is looking to expand the technology behind its mobile payments system to eventually replace everything from building security cards, subway passes, and bus tickets.

Apple representatives have reportedly been talking to potential partners about using the iPhone 6’s NFC for other uses, reports The Information, with the aim to replace all the tickets and passes you carry in your wallet too.

Samsung could be understood for questioning the brand loyalty of its South Korean fans: iPhone 6 and 6 Plus have reportedly racked up a massive 100,000 preorders since going on sale in the country Friday. That’s more than three times the number of South Korean preorders for Samsung’s Galaxy Note 4.

Just like one of The Avengers — where bickering superheroes team up to fight a far more oppressive evil — Apple and Android fans on reddit have united forces to boycott what they see as the unethical blocking of NFC payment systems by a number of different retailers, affecting users of both Apple Pay and Google Wallet.

The reason for this blocking of the NFC service is that the retailers in question — including Gap, Old Navy, 7-Eleven, Sears, Kmart and others — are part of an organization called Merchant Customer Exchange, which uses its own payment system called CurrentC.