Whether or not the upcoming iPhone 6 will sport a sapphire crystal display or not is something we’ll have to wait to find out for sure, but the ultra-strong material used by many high end watch manufacturers is certainly something Apple has spent a lot of time investigating.

Some of those investigations have led to a new patent application published today, revealing how Apple plans a technique for strengthening glass by using an “ion implanting” method as opposed to the kind of chemical coatings used for, say, Corning’s Gorilla Glass.

According to the application, the reason for this is that the kind of traditional chemical strengthening techniques used on glass screens might not be effective when used on materials like sapphire.

Forget Spotify, Pandora and Beats Music. I’ve tried them all, and for my money, Rdio is the best streaming music subscription service out there. It has the best app design and, for my tastes, the best music selection. But you have to pay.

An update, though, is trying to make Rdio much more palatable to free users, as well as help all users find new music faster. It’s making the service free to everyone, emphasizing ad-supported stations for free users (with up to 15 times as many tracks as competing services), and new, smart social services for paid users.

Considering that just a few short years ago Apple was scoring dead last on Greenpeace’s report on green-friendly data centres, the company has made amazing strides in order to turn around its reputation.

In a new September report from Greenpeace, entitled “Green Gadgets: Designing the Future,” the global environmental organization says that Apple is doing more than any other manufacturer to reduce the damage it does to the environment. The report notes that Apple has kept its promise to eliminate use of hazardous materials including Polyvinylchloride (PVC) and Brominated flame retardants (BFRs) in its products.

I like the Lensbaby that I have for my regular camera, but I frikkin’ love the Lensbaby LM–10 for the iPhone. Like most things that make the trip from elsewhere to iOS, the little Lensbaby offers a subset of the original’s features, but they are – dare I say – a more focused set of features.

Let’s just say the iPhone Lensbaby is about the funnest iPhoneography accessory around.

Microsoft may enjoy bragging about the perceived superiority of its Windows Phone virtual assistant Cortana over Apple’s Siri, but the actress who voices Cortana apparently isn’t so convinced.

In a recent tweet, actress Jen Taylor (@jentaylortown) tweeted the message “Oh my geez Seattle is beautiful” via iOS, suggesting that while Microsoft may be helping bring in the paychecks, that money is going on Apple products.

While China is where a lot of Apple’s focus has been in terms of expanding into new territories, India is also a fast developing smartphone market where the Apple brand is doing very well.

According to a new report, Apple has sold more than 1 million iPhones in India since the start of the current financial year — representing a significant milestone for a company that wasn’t considered to be a serious contender in the South Asian market until relatively recently.

Although the sales data was not released, research agencies put the figure at 1.02 million between October 2013 and August 2014, with a total of 1.1 million units projected by the time the fiscal year ends on September 30.

Four years ago, Apple debuted the iPad with the first of what would soon become a widely parodied style of video, in which Apple’s Senior Vice President of Design Jony Ive said of Apple’s first tablet: “It’s true that when something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical, and that’s exactly what the iPad is. It’s hard to see how something so simple, so thin, and so light, could possibly be so capable.”

As Apple knew it would, the video made a huge impact on people… so big an impact that it soon became a well-worn format for parody. Now, even Swedish furniture retailer Ikea is getting in on the game with their latest ad, which uses all the same beats and breathless rapture of Jony Ive talking about the iPad, but to promote the 2015 Ikea catalog instead. Well done.

See Apple’s original iPad introduction video below.

Photos: Kahney family archives and Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

In his latest column for The New York Times, Nick Bilton drops an interesting tidbit about Jony Ive and the iWatch.

The mythical wearable, which is expected to finally see the light of day at next week’s Apple event, is something Ive has been bragging about around Apple HQ. He thinks it will be so good that even Swiss watchmakers won’t know what hit them.

Apple’s event on September 9th is going to be huge. Sure, iPhone announcements come around every 12 months, but this year Apple’s going bigger than ever with two product launches, a gigantic venue, and a mysterious white cube.

We investigated Apple’s mystery box ourselves last week and still couldn’t piece together what it’s for, but according to rumblings on the Internet, U2 will be the headlining act during next week’s event, and will launch their next album by pre-loading it on every new iPhone 6.

It may sound too crazy to be true, but U2 fans are already convinced Bono and The Edge will tear up the stage at the Flint Center, and there’s come compelling proof.

Here’s the evidence:

Apple and Google have resumed mediation talks with tech workers who are suing Silicon Valley’s top tech firms for an alleged anti-hiring agreement orchestrated by Steve Jobs.

Court filings indicate that Intel and Adobe are also participating in the talks as the companies attempt to reach a new settlement for the class action case, after U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh rejected the companies’ proposed settlement of $324.5 million last month.

Apple might reveal its first ever phablet next week with the 5.5-inch iPhone 6, and while many Apple fanboys question the need for an iPhone the size of a dinner plate, IDC’s latest market projections reveal Apple is about to get in on the phablet craze at the perfect time.

Over the next four years phablet sales are expected to grow more than any other smartphone, tablet, or PC category. Worldwide phablet shipments are will pass portable PCs by the end of 2014 with 175 million units sold, but that number will to explode to 318 million units in 2015, making smartphones with screen sizes from 5.5 to less than 7 inches more popular than the tablets that spawned them.

Here’s IDC’s projections:

I’ll admit it — I’ve got a thing for these waxed canvas and leather bags from Waterfield. I’ve ended up using the impeccably designed Staad backpack and the classy Nintendo 3DS case long after my reviews of them were published. These bags and cases from the San Francisco design collective are warm, inviting and just get better with age and use.

Let’s face it, though: Sometimes you only want to carry your laptop and a couple of accessories, and that’s it. Waterfield’s latest design, the MacBook Outback Solo, is a minimalist sleeve made of the same strong canvas material and rich, thick, buttery-smooth leather as the other bags in the line. It can be paired with a carrying strap that turns the sleeve into a messenger bag. While our very own Charlie Sorrel called the iPad version of this bag a man-purse, I’m thinking of this more as a shoulder-saving device — the fewer things I end up having to carry, the better.

This little sleeve is perfect for exactly that.

We’re still six days away from the official unveiling of the iPhone 6, but a set of professional line-sitters in NYC are already setting up camp in front of the iconic Fifth Avenue Apple Store.

Dan Benton spotted the iPhone 6 line this morning, and while the previous record for waiting camping out for the iPhone was 18 days, this group started 19 days before the iPhone 6 is expected to hit shelves.

Most of the campers are professional line sitters and are just using it to get some free press for new apps and other services, but the true fanboys will probably start filing in any day now. The iPhone 6 is expected to be revealed at an event on September 9th followed by a public release about two weeks after.

By now you’ve probably heard about the avalanche of celebrity nude photos that slammed the Web on Labor Day. But amid the chaos of FBI investigations, celeb denials and Apple PR releases that say basically nothing, understanding how the attackers executed the hack — and how to prevent it from happening to you — hasn’t been so clear.

Apple recommended that all users enable two-step verification “to protect against this type of attack,” but the truth about iCloud’s two-step security is a little more complicated than Apple’s letting on, and turning it on probably wouldn’t have prevented the celebrities’ pics from getting hacked in the first place.

To help sort through the confusing mess, we’ve broken down everything you need to know about iCloud’s security and how you can use two-factor authentication and other security steps to keep some perv named 4chan from blasting your nips all over the Internet.

Ruby On Rails is widely considered to be one of the best frameworks for web development today. This is because it streamlines the programming process.

You can gain this knowledge and become an expert web developer with The Ruby On Rails Rookie To Rockstar Bundle at Cult of Mac Deals. Plus, at just $49, it’s available for a limited time at 92% off the regular price.

Beamdog Entertainment is a team of ex-Bioware and Black Isle developers who specialize on taking classic Infinity Engine RPGs and updating them for modern devices, like the Mac or iPad. First, they did it for Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II and now they are doing it with Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition, coming soon to a Mac or iPad near you.

Jimmy Kimmel is the talk show host most likely to chime in on an Apple-related topic, but with the recent news about dozens of celebrity nude images being leaked thanks to iCloud hacking, Conan O’Brien has also chipped in with his take.

In a video posted to Conan’s “Team Coco” YouTube account, O’Brien imagines what it might be like to hire a team of computer experts to hack the iCloud account of the person responsible for doing the hacking. The result is a series of amusing images showing a variety of NSFW activities, including naked bullwhip sessions, lewd acts featuring a Super Nintendo, and begging former celebrity Jon Gosselin for an autograph.

OS X will get a new Photos app next year that will keep all your pictures in sync across all your devices. It will work with the iOS 8 Photos apps on iPhone and iPad to match up your full-res photographs, your albums and even the edits you make to your pictures.

The changes are a ways off, but fret not -– if you use Adobe’s Lightroom Mobile, you can enjoy this fabulous cross-platform photo synchronization right now.

Apple is constantly looking to improve the App Store experience, and ahead of the long-awaited release of the iPhone 6 and public version of iOS 8, it is doubling its efforts.

With these two landmark events coming up rapidly, the company has updated its App Store review guidelines to add all-new sections dealing with features such as HealthKit, HomeKit and TestFlight, extensions and more.

Martin Hajek’s incredible renders come in two equally impressive categories. The first are the realistic recreations of upcoming devices that that the artist put togethers based on leaked parts and schematics: for example, his incredible iPhone 6 render.

But Martin Hajek does another kind of concept as well: his purely conceptual imaginings of what still unrevealed Apple gadgets like the iWatch or the Apple HDTV.

This might be a first though. In his latest series of rendering, Hajek has paired both kinds of renders together: the iPhone 6, a design we know, with the iWatch, a design that is, to all of us, still a mystery. And if the real iWatch + iPhone 6 combo looks half as good in real life as Hajek’s, we’re in for an exciting year. More images after the jump.

There have been numerous companies, from Samsung downwards, willing to leap onto the smart watch bandwagon to try and beat it to market. Wellograph’s new smart watch, however, perhaps comes the closest to what many users are expecting to see from Apple — with the world’s first wellness-focused smart watch sporting a sapphire crystal display.

The 1.26-inch LCD display watch is available to ship now, and comes with various smart functions, including a Tri­-LED heart­ rate sensor, which replicates the action of a doctor using their fingers to feel for a pulse and provides real-time readings of heart signals.

Supply chain sources speaking to Digitimes claim that component production is ramping up for Apple’s next generation 9.7-inch iPad. According to the report, the tablet will be unchanged when it comes to size and resolution, but will sport an even thinner profile, enhanced processor, and improved Touch ID fingerprint recognition technology.

Piper Jaffries analyst Gene Munster: Thanks to his endless advocacy of the so-called Apple HDTV, claiming year after year that Apple’s television set is just a few months away, Munster’s a bit of a laughingstock, even amongst the shallow knowledge pool of most tech analysts.

Instead of predicting the imminent arrival of a mythical Apple device, though, in Munster’s latest note, he’s making a far more reasonable prediction: When the iPhone 6 makes its debut September 9, only the 64GB model will ship with a sapphire glass display. And he’s got a call on the iWatch as well.