When Apple Maps disastrously launched in 2012 even the most faithful of Apple fanboys thought it’d never be competitive against the obviously superior Google Maps. But just two years after it announced its own mapping platform, Apple is now dominating Google in mapping traffic on 4G, at least on one U.K. carrier.

We’ve already seen two new iPhone part leaks out coming out of China this morning, but to complete today’s hat trick a new set of images show that Apple could be looking to make some serious improvements to the iPhone’s True Tone flash module.

Several new iPhone 6 parts have been leaked according to Nowhereelse.fr, among which is an alleged iPhone 6 flex cable that shows Apple has created a round True Tone flash module.

Cameras: We all have them. Some of us just use the camera feature built into our mobile phones. Some have simple and cost effective point and click cameras. While others have more expensive and feature laden digital SLR units. What do they all have in common? The ability to take breath taking photographs – provided the user has the right training, that is.

Now anyone can get the training necessary to take jaw dropping photos no matter what type of camera they are using with The Fantastic Photography Bundle, just $49 at Cult of Mac Deals.

Can’t get enough of celebrity gossip? You’re not alone. Up in Redmond, Microsoft is so obsessed with keeping up with the Kardashians that they have just released a custom-built an attractive new celebrity news app called Snipp3t. And while the use to which Snipp3t is meant to be put may look a little tawdry, the app design itself is actually really nice.

Vesper, the note-taking app developed in part by John Gruber of Daring Fireball, has been updated with a cool new feature that allows you to easily see the timestamp, character, or word count for a Vesper note… without adding a lot of on-screen clutter.

From the mathematical brilliance of Threes to the insanely addictive, Design Award-winning Blek, iOS users are spoiled for choice when it comes to great puzzle games on their iOS.

Does that mean developers should throw in the towel and stop making them, then? On the contrary, as the great Alan Partridge once said about regional detective shows: “Another way of looking at it is, people like them, let’s make some more of them.”

The “more of them” in question is Cubical, a seemingly straightforward puzzler that asks you to match the colours of different cubes by tapping them before the time runs out. And it’s a whole lot of fun.

Since it first opened up in Julu of 2008, the App Store has paid developers over $13 billion at last count, and the marketplace hosts are over 1 million third-party programs. That makes the App Store a success by almost any measure… except discoverability.

Even today, the App Store can be extremely hard to navigate. Dominated by clones of popular apps and freemium crapware, good apps often get buried at the bottom of the App Store thanks to the App Store’s notoriously bad search engine and almost non-existent curation.

But former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée has a suggestion. Make the App Store more like Reddit. Let anonymous humans curate it.

Aside from the larger phablet-sized display, one of the most visually obvious changes we’d heard about for the iPhone 6 was the possibility that the cutout Apple logo on its rear would enable LED-powered user notifications, or MacBook-style illumination.

Well, that may not be happening after all, according to newly leaked images from Taiwanese Apple blog AppleClub. The website has posted what appears to be a stack of Apple logos, ready to be fitted to the back panel of the next generation iPhone, featuring nothing in the way of LEDs or connectors.

The person who posted the image also confirms that the logo is not planned to emit light as previously speculated about.

Apple’s beloved co-founder Steve Wozniak turns 64 years old today. Steve Jobs may be the most admired figure to come out of Apple, but with his imperious distance from us mere mortals, he was hard to love.

Wozniak, on the other hand, is well and truly beloved by the tech community.

A true Silicon Valley original, he’s the genius who invented the personal computer, got rich, and then spent his fortune having fun rather than taking over the world. It doesn’t hurt that he’s also a practical joker, all-around nerd, and someone who has never been afraid to speak his mind about technology’s power to change the world.

Want to improve your Monday by seeing how design guru Jony Ive lives? Over the weekend, Business Insider ran a gallery, showcasing Apple’s acclaimed design guru’s home on San Francisco’s “Gold Coast,” also known as “Billionaire’s Row.”

Over the weekend, UK newspaper The Mirror published a series of photos which they claim is a working unit of Apple’s 4.7-inch iPhone 6, complete with retail box.

“There’s no 100% proof that the photos are authentic, but the details on show line up with the dozens of details already seeping onto the web about the next generation Apple handset,” the paper said.

Saying that the photos may not be 100% authentic is quite the overstatement. In fact, considering the fact that iOS 8’s biggest new app — Healthbook — is entirely missing from the screen, we’re going to say we’re about 100% sure that The Mirror got had.

More photos after the jump. What do you think?

Another day, another apparent leak of the forthcoming iPhone 6, expected to be unveiled by Apple on September 9.

The photos appeared on the Taiwanese website AppleClub, and look to show the exterior and interior of the 4.7-inch iPhone’s front panel.

Although they don’t offer us anything revelatory that we’ve not seen before in grainy leaked-photo detail, they do does further give us one of the clearest looks yet at some of the changes we’re expecting to see with the next generation Apple handset: namely a larger display and rounded edges.

Despite its role as a manufacturer for the eagerly-anticipated iPhone 6, Apple manufacturer Foxconn has announced July as being responsible for its lowest monthly earnings since March 2013.

Surprisingly this comes not long after Foxconn posted record earnings of $131.82 billion for 2013, while company chairman Terry Gou claimed that this year’s earnings would be even greater. Nonetheless the company’s consolidated revenues of just (!) $8.66 billion for the month of July represents a decrease of 17.91 percent on month, and 13.3 percent year-on-year.

So what’s responsible for the drop?

Looks like Microsoft is up to its old tricks again!

Not happy to simply put out the Surface (and, to be honest, who can blame them?) and then let the market decide if it’s interested, the good folks at Redmond have decided on a new ad campaign that skewers Apple and its “You’re more powerful than you think” strap line.

How will the culture Steve Jobs cultivated at Apple continue to live on after his death? That was the main question being asked when Jobs lost the battle to cancer in 2011.

Part of the answer is a program Jobs put together around the time of the original iPhone launch. Apple University, which works almost exactly like you would imagine, teaches employees about the company’s history and ethos. Real class names include “Communicating at Apple,” “What Makes Apple, Apple,” and “The Best Things.”

In the most in-depth look at the educational program to date, The New York Times sheds light on the kinds of classes Ivy League professors teach about everything from designing like Picasso to choosing which buttons go on a TV remote.

As the eighth of the planned ten episodes in this final season of HBO vamp-drama, True Blood, “Almost Home” brings more storylines to a close, weaning us off the Bon Temps drama gently, with a few fun explodey bits along the way.

Eric and Pam get the lowdown on Mr. Gus’ final solution to the Nu Blood plan to total market domination, while Hoyt, Jason and Jessica start to clean up their complications. The missing kids and jealous vampire story comes to an abrupt yet satisfying end, and Sookie does all she can to help find a cure for her true love, Vampire Bill.

Be warned! Spoilers abound below, but as this is another talky episode, for the most part, we’re going to keep it short and to the point.

In today’s video we take a quick look into the revamped Apple TV software – 7.0. Which was released to developers earlier this week, which gives us a good indication to what the final software will look and feel like when released to the public this Fall.

Take a look at the video above to see the 7.0 beta for Apple TV in action!

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

Over the course of the week, Cult of Mac Deals has offered up a number of bargains designed to make your life easier, more productive, and fun.

We don’t want you to miss out, so here’s just some of what you can get for a limited time only.

The fifth beta of OS X Yosemite was released to developers a few days a go, with the operating system getting closer to a general release, in today’s video we take a look at the subtle changes Apple has made in the latest beta.

Take a look at the video to see the changes in action.

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

For music enthusiasts, there’s no audio organization software quite like iTunes. Still, unless you continually spend hours upon hours going through all of your ripped and downloaded music with a fine toothed comb, your iTunes is probably a mess. Enter TuneUp to save your iTunes day!

TuneUp is a nifty little piece of software that reorganizes your iTunes by getting rid of duplicate files, cleaning up your untitled tracks, and filling in missing album cover artwork! What’s more, you can get TuneUp working for you for just $19.95, that’s 60% off, at Cult of Mac Deals.

This week: iThieves, beware—Find My iPhone is now a tool for vigilante justice; iPhone 6 release date is leaked; we reveal our favorite must-have apps for Mac and iOS; why the next iPhone could ship standard with 32GB; and we wrap’er up with all-new Get To Know Your Cultist: movie edition!

Snicker your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the chuckles begin.

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.

Show notes ahead.

Halt and Catch Fire isn’t Silicon Valley where the presence of a woman in a skirt sends the coders into a tailspin. This is the dying cry of the zipless f**k, before everyone got spooked about AIDS. This is hot neon, the smell of the soldering gun on a circuit board, and the deep empty place inside that drives creative people to do crazy things, think different, and meet each other where the metal meets the code.

Unfortunately, dismal ratings may possibly keep the show, whose plot hinges on a rag-tag group of misfits reverse engineering the IBM PC around the same time Woz & Jobs were busy home-brewing in the garage, from being picked up for a second season.

You can watch Halt and Catch Fire, named for the machine code (HCF) that was able to cause a computer to stop working, on AMC or iTunes.

We feel so strongly about this retro-tastic show (Coleco! Pong! Texas Instruments!) that we put up a petition to save it. Here’s why you should sign:

Reports of the Apple’s ban in China have been greatly exaggerated according to the country’s chief procurement center, which has denied a report from earlier this week that claimed MacBooks, iPhones and iPads have been banned from state use by the Chinese government.

Security concerns were allegedly the reason for the banning in the first, but according to a Reuters report, Apple’s short exclusion from the country’s procurement list was just a simple misunderstanding.