It’s been one month since Apple blasted U2’s loud, proud, and totally free new album, Song of Innocence, onto every iTunes account in the world, and now the the complaints have died down, Eddie Cue has revealed how enormously successful the free album has been.

Over 81 million iTunes users have ‘experienced’ Song of Innocence Cue told Billboard, and further divulged that downloads of the album in its entirety have topped 26 million.

First of all Microsoft announces plans for a flagship Fifth Avenue Store to compete with Apple’s iconic glass cube, and now Amazon apparently wants to get in on the brick-and-mortar game, too.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon plans to open its first physical retail store in time for Christmas on Manhattan’s 34th Street.

While that might seem counter-intuitive for a company which essentially dealt the death knell to many brick-and-mortar stores, it’s designed to be an extension of the online experience — offering customers the ability to pick up orders placed online, or return and exchange products.

We’ve known that Apple Pay is coming sometime in October, but now more details have to come to light about when banks will start supporting the service.

It’s likely that Tim Cook doesn’t exactly look forward to hearing from Carl Icahn, but it’s difficult to argue that the activist investor isn’t a massive cheerleader for Apple.

As promised, Icahn published his open letter to Tim Cook today and the big surprise (spoiler alert!) is that he feels his 45 million shares of AAPL stock are grossly undervalued.

In a message entitled “Sale: Apple Shares at Half Price,” Icahn explains why he believes Apple stock is currently trading at half its true value, instead claiming it should be priced at $203 per share — based on growth forecast for the next two years, alongside the company’s massive cash reserves.

iPhone 6 buyers were slightly disappointed to learn that Apple’s newest smartphones only come with 1GB of RAM, but according to the Chinese site GeekBar, Apple is planning to beef up performance on the iPad Air by packing 2GB of RAM onto the new tablet.

The third-party Apple repair site posted a photo on Weibo of what it claims are the new 2GB RAM chips made by Japanese manufacturer, Elpida. Take a look at the chips below :

Tired of being stuck with tiny little Emojis?

Well, the developer for new app LOLy has the solution: huge, animated emoticons that you can send to friends via text message, Facebook, or email. You can also just copy them and send along to any other text-accepting app, like Twitter, Kik, or Whatsapp.

The images are cute and fun to send, and once you’ve used the images included with the free LOLy app, you’ll want to grab a couple more packs for $0.99 each.

“I primarily designed this app for women with a focus on the 30s-50s demographic,” says app developer Gina Pell. “I had a hunch that most emoji were geared towards teens and lacked the sophistication, style, or wit that my friends or I would find interesting.”

When constructing an iOS app, there’s so much more to consider than just the source code. Your app needs to be as user friendly as possible, which is where design skills come into play.

Now you can learn to bring both coding and design skills to the table with Design + Code: Learn iOS Design & Xcode at a savings of 66% for a limited time at Cult of Mac Deals.

How GT Advanced Technologies could have filed for bankruptcy, despite Apple’s best efforts to prop it up, is still something of a mystery — and it’ll stay like that if the company gets its way.

According to a Reuters report, GT Advanced has requested that the New Hampshire bankruptcy court currently overseeing its case put the kibosh on releasing key documents related to a “third party,” claiming that this would allow it avoid paying damages thanks to confidentiality agreements.

Massive demand for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus may have resulted in Apple’s eagerly anticipated 12.9-inch Retina iPad being pushed back to 2015, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal. This chimes with August reports from Bloomberg claiming that the mythical iPad Maxi would arrive by early next year.

Apple reportedly planned to produce the larger iPad in mass volume starting in December, but had to put that idea on hold so its supply chain can fulfill iPhone 6 orders — particularly for the iPhone 6 Plus, which has proven more popular than even Apple expected.

Current rumor suggests that the next iPad Air will be even thinner than the last one.

And as we know from the release of the last iPhone, when something’s thinner… well, it’s likely to get bent.

So what will happen if Bendgate comes to the iPad? Our favorite concept designer Martin Hajek imagines the next iPad Air if it proves as pliable as the iPhone 6.

There are more images after the jump. What do you think?

Update: False alarm. As we suggested was a possibility, Philips was misunderstood by a reporter. They are actually just bundling Apple TV’s with new televisions, not building in the hardware.

We don’t know exactly what Apple plans on announcing next Thursday, but one thing’s for sure: It’s not just new iPads.

The tagline for the event — “It’s been far too long” — implies that we’re about to see a new version of a product that hasn’t been updated for a while.

One strong candidate is the Apple TV. But if a (possibly premature) announcement by consumer electronics company Philips is anything to go by, Apple might not just be giving the Apple TV a spec bump. Cupertino might announce instead that it will be integrating Apple TV hardware into third-party television sets!

Apple has retained its position as the world’s most valuable brand, according to the latest Interbrand’s Best Global Brands report. Last year Cupertino seized the No. 1 spot from Coca-Cola, a company 90 years older than Apple.

The report valued Apple’s brand at a whopping $118.9 billion, compared to the $100 billion it was valued at in 2013. In doing so it beat out Google, Coca-Cola, IBM and Microsoft, which filled out the remaining top five spots on the list.

Other tech companies which ranked highly on the top 100 list included Samsung (No. 7), Intel (No. 12), Cisco (No. 14), Amazon (No. 15) and Facebook (No. 29).

When Twin Peaks mesmerized us with its weird mix of mystery, mysticism and Americana in the early ’90s, smartphones didn’t exist. But even if the iPhone had already conquered the world, it’s possible nobody in the small Pacific Northwest town that served as the show’s setting would have owned one.

The forested fantasyland of Twin Peaks was a purposely backward backdrop upon which series creators David Lynch and Mark Frost could project their twisted vision of the darkness that lurks below the wholesome surface of American society. While the show was set in 1989, the small-town setting was a deliberate throwback to ’50s-style innocence, which was quickly shattered by the discovery of a beautiful teen’s corpse.

When Twin Peaks resurfaces in 2016 on Showtime, the cultural landscape will have changed radically from where the series left off a quarter-century ago. What kind of fascinating freak show will Lynch and Frost craft as they bring the show into the digital age?

To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports about the death of PCs have been greatly exaggerated. Or they have for Apple, at least.

According to new numbers from market analysts IDC, Apple sold an impressive 4.9 million Macs in the third quarter of 2014, representing an overall increase of 8.9% year-over-year. What does that mean? In short, that Apple is now in the top five PC vendors worldwide based on number of units shipped.

Before the iPhone 6 was officially announced, developers confirmed the higher resolution of the iPhone 6 by examining the beta for iOS 8, specifically in the way apps would prefer to load a 3x image over the 2x image on existing Retina Devices.

Now the iOS 8.1 beta is out, and developers are discovering that it will similarly call up 3x versions of many iPad UI assets, implying that the iPad could be seeing a resolution bump sometime soon.

Apple is throwing its name into the hat of big name tech companies trying to even the male-female ratio within high tech, by sending hundreds of its employees to recruit students attending this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference.

The three-day conference — this year celebrating its twentieth birthday — is dedicated to closing the gender gap that exists in technical jobs in Silicon Valley. It is named after Grace Hopper, a U.S. computer scientist who was one of the first programmers of World War II’s groundbreaking Harvard Mark I computer, and invented the first compiler for a computer programming language.

Other companies attending the conference include Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

When The Magazine ceases publication this December, owner Glenn Fleishman will be closing shop on an ambitious two-year experiment in digital publishing.

It’s not a total surprise — subscriptions were already on a downward trend when Fleishman transitioned from editor to owner of The Magazine after purchasing the publication from Marco Arment last year — and it’s not a total bummer, either.

In fact, Fleishman says he’s feeling pretty good about stopping here: he’s met his obligation to provide Kickstarter backers with their one-year subscriptions, and he’s ending this fascinating experiment while it’s still profitable.

“I’m even able to pay myself an ever-declining hourly rate for my time,” said Fleishman, who spoke with Cult of Mac about what went right, what went wrong, and his feelings about pulling the plug on a project that was his full-time job for the last year and a half.

In Apple’s invitation to the company’s October 16th Town Hall event at its Cupertino headquarters, the company’s tagline is: “It’s been way too long.”

This has prompted a lot of speculation. It hasn’t been too long since Apple’s last event, which was just a month ago. And there aren’t that many other Apple products that we haven’t seen updated in the last year, with the exception of Thunderbolt displays, which frankly aren’t important enough to reference in an Apple tagline that the whole world will scrutinize.

But here’s a good theory. What if the tagline doesn’t reference a single product, but a variation of product? What if we’re about to see the return of colored Macs?

The tagline for next week’s Apple media event is “It’s been way too long.” While that might be nothing more than a sarcastic nod to the fact that Cupertino announced the Apple Watch and iPhone 6 just last month, it could be a cryptic indication that we’ll see updates to some of the company’s neglected products.

Rumors suggest new iPads and Macs will share the stage at Apple’s October 16 event, and we’ll probably get OS X Yosemite’s release date and more talk about iOS 8 and Apple Pay, but what about the rest of the product lineup?

Here’s a look at Apple products currently languishing in update hell, along with some rumors and speculation about what the future might hold.

Bendgate was the Internet’s Meme of the Week at the beginning of October, so if you’re still banging your head to come up with a funny Halloween costume idea, why not  poke fun at your own love for Apple and rollout in this DYI Bendgate costume?

The folks at Halloween Costume created this simple iPhone 6 costume you can make at home with just foam or cardboard paper. The display is slightly more forgiving in bend tests, but that might because they forgot to update their iPhone 6 to iOS 8.

If you’d rather go geeky than ghoulish this Halloween, here’s how to make your own Bendgate costume:

Bullish activist-investor Carl Icahn is back again! In a tweet sent earlier today, Icahn noted that he plans to send Tim Cook an open letter tomorrow. The contents of this letter are unknown, but Icahn promises it will be “interesting,” to say the least.

Popcorn Time’s popularity has taken off this year by bringing BitTorrent streaming into the mainstream with a lineup of apps that let users watch nearly any new blockbuster they want for free with just the tap of a finger.

We published a hack that brings the popular Netflix-alternative to iOS 8 users for the first time ever without a jailbreak, but before diving into an endless buffet of the world’s most popular movies and TV shows, you might be wondering just where this magical software came from, and most importantly: can it be trusted?

After being available to the public for more than seven months, many aspects of Popcorn Time are still a mystery – like who’s actually building it – but, here’s everything you need to know about the hot new torrenting service:

The Magazine, one of the best original technology-focused Newsstand magazines out there, is closing up shop as of December of this year.

The Magazine raised the bar for a digital-only publication, providing well-written and edited short and long non-fiction that ranged topically from Apple to personal stories with true warmth and impact. We’ll miss the twice monthly title and wish the team the best.

When asked on Twitter why the publication was ending, The Magazine’s official account cited money issues.

Smartphones made of metal are far fancier than their plastic counterparts, but like other metallic objects, they will bend with enough force. No, “Bendgate” is not exclusive to the iPhone 6 Plus; Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 4 — its first phablet to sport a metal chassis — will bend just as easily if you’re not careful with it.