The state of the tablet industry has not been promising lately. Over the last few months Apple reported slumping iPad sales, Best Buy’s CEO declared that tablet sales are “crashing,” and many analysts and pundits have eagerly declared the tablet fab is coming to an end, but Recode’s Walt Mossberg has a few points to make in defense of the tablet.

While IDC expects tablet sales to flatline by the end of 2014, Tim Cook indicated to Mossberg that the future of tablets is still bright, calling the current lull in sales a mere “speed bump.”

Apple is working with suppliers to make a 12.9-inch iPad by early next year, according to Bloomberg.

Although is was rumored that Apple was working on a larger iPad throughout 2013, we have yet to see such a tablet come out of Cupertino. Will 2015 finally be the year of the mythical iPad Maxi?

With ski season closer than you can believe, it’s time to start drooling over the amazing HD footage out there on the web. So you can dream away your workday with these moving images, you’ll need to check out this amazing footage from four powder fanatics who used only Go Pro cameras to film their fresh exploits across the coolest drops in Hokkaido, Japan, Pemberton, British Columbia and Mt. Hood, Oregon.

Check out the extreme shots below and start gathering your lift tickets, high-end goggles and ski wax.

In an amazing twist of celebrity, Community star and rapper Donald Glover has gotten to voice Miles Morales, the Ultimate Spider-Man, in the Disney XD animated series.

As it’s Glover that was the original inspiration behind the alternate universe Spidey, written by comics star Brian Michael Bendis, this is a treat for fans and the actor himself.

“That’s the great part about the Spider-Man costume: He can be anybody,” Glover told USA Today. “Spider-Man could be a girl. Spider-Man could be an old man. You don’t know. So I just tried to be as me as possible, because you’re always just going to bring it back to yourself when you watch the show.”

Check out the clip below as Peter Parker (voiced by Drake Bell) meets Miles Morales, voiced by Glover.

Apple TV added Showtime’s new on-demand video service, Showtime Anytime, to the list of channels available to Apple TV user in the U.S. today.

The Showtime Anytime service has been available on a number of other set-top boxes, including the Roku, Xbox 360, and Amazon’s FireTV, but is finally coming to Apple’s set-top box as it amps up content ahead of a rumored 2015 redesign.

Verizon Wireless announced today that it is preparing to roll out Voice over LTE (VoLTE) support to its millions of subscribers over the next few weeks, just ahead of Apple’s planned release of iOS 8 which is rumored to bring VoLTE support to the iPhone for the first time.

The addition of VoLTE will allow Verizon customers to send and receive voice calls over the faster LTE network, rather than using old technologies like 3G, resulting in high-definition voice calls as well as video.

For decades Mac and the PC have been at each other’s throats, competing for that No. 1 spot in the computing world. Vitriolic ad campaigns and entire product launches aimed at decimating Windows or OS X have firmly established a war that somehow hasn’t ended even in the post-PC era.

With Apple’s release of OS X Yosemite sitting just around the corner, the time for Microsoft to answer with Windows 9 is nearly here. In today’s video, we go into everything we know about OS X Yosemite and what we think we know about Windows 9 so far. We break down all the new features, design elements and more to help you start forming your opinion about which OS is best.

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

You’ve got a great web presence. Now, you have to protect it from hackers that want to steal your customer’s 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, that’s just $49, at Cult of Mac Deals.

Later today Instagram will release a new stand alone app for iOS called Hyperlapse, reports Wired, that will allow users to create time lapse videos that are unfathomably smooth thanks to a its accompanying stabilization algorithm.

Rather than bringing it’s stand alone messaging app Bolt into the spotlight, Instagram is releasing its first ever tool for capturing time lapse video, and comes right as Apple is adding time lapse video to iOS 8, only Hyperlapse comes with a few advantages that Apple’s baked-in version doesn’t have.

Amazon is quickly learning that 3D gimmicks and a lack of third-party app support aren’t attributes consumers tend to look for in a smartphone, with one report suggesting that the retail giant has sold fewer than 35,000 Fire Phones since the device made its debut back in July.

Apple may be on the verge of releasing its most generously-sized iPhone yet, but the company is always on the lookout for new ways of providing screen real estate to its users.

A new patent published today by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office show how Apple is investigating “Electronic devices with flexible displays,” featuring a flexible display layer overlaid on top of buttons, switchers, speakers, microphones and other components which feature in iOS devices.

Super Battle Tactics is a free-to-play iOS game published by DeNA that has you using virtual tanks to face off against other players or AI opponents; you’ll choose which upgrades and tactics you’ll use your available action points on to outwit and destroy the enemy tanks.

Sometimes, though, you just want a little help in climbing the leaderboards, ranking up as fast as you can. To that end, we went straight to the publisher for these exclusive tips and tricks to help you take your game to the next level. Check them out below, and feel free to add in your own.

Normally a story about a stolen iPod touch wouldn’t be worthy of major news coverage. That changes, however, when the iPod touch in question is used to control its war veteran owner’s prosthetic hand.

The iPod touch belongs to Afghanistan vet Staff Sgt. Ben Eberle, 27, who lost both his right hand and two legs in a bomb explosion three years ago while on a tour of duty. The device features an app called i-limb, which allows Eberle to use his prosthetic hand.

The creator of minimalist text game A Dark Room has just released an intriguing new title entitled Gridland. Although the game has yet to arrive in the App Store, it is playable on iOS devices using Safari.

Gridland is a match-3 game, which requires players to make matches in order to gather resources and build buildings during the day — and then to fight off creatures at night. In other words, it’s every bit as “out there” as A Dark Room — and quite possibly as immersive as well.

Apple has updated its lineup for next month’s iTunes Festival London, adding several new names including Tony Bennett and Mary J. Blige, demonstrating just how wide-ranging the festival is in terms of its music.

The festival kicks off in September, taking place at the Roundhouse in London. As always, tickets are 100 percent free, although attendees will need to win competitions (organized by Apple and local partners) in order to get hold of them.

The current festival lineup can be seen below:

Los Angeles teachers union president Alex Caputo-Pearl has called for an investigation into Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent John Deasy’s relationship with Apple, which led to the announcement that the school system had blown its entire $1 billion tech budget on giving an iPad to every student last year.

Although the iPad deal was later put on hold, the L.A. Board of Education is being pressured by Caputo-Pearl to investigate why Deasy and his then-chief deputy, Jaime Aquino, were apparently discussing the deal with Apple and education publisher Pearson up to two years before the official bidding process was finished and contracts were approved.

AAPL is back in a big way. After breaking an all-time high of $100.53, the price of Apple shares have continued to climb upward, and according the a WSJ report, hedge funds are piling onto the stock in droves.

Over the second quarter of 2014 henge funds have purchased $855 million in new positions in Apple, giving AAPL the second highest level of new buying activity among S&P 500 stocks.

SACRAMENTO — California just flipped the kill switch for smartphones, in a move to make iCrime a thing of the past.

Governor Jerry Brown signed into law State Sen. Mark Leno’s Smartphone Theft Prevention Act (Senate Bill 962). The law will affect any smartphone manufactured on or after July 1, 2015.

There’s some reason to hope that the kill switch will do for smartphones what sophisticated alarm systems did for cars: make stealing them less appealing than a pair of leg warmers. Car thefts plummeted 96 percent  in New York City when engine immobilizer systems came into play.

The world’s top tennis players are descending on New York City this week to slap the fuzz off some tennis balls in pursuit of an unprecedented $38.3 million purse, and Ralph Lauren is ready to support the cause by arming the tournament’s ball boys with its new line of iPhone-connected smart shirts.

As the first round of the tournament gets underway today, the luxury clothing line announced its first move into the space of tech wearables with an entire line of smart shirts with built-in health sensors for both athletic and professional occasions.

China is planning to take on Apple and Google with a new homegrown operating system that will launch this year, as Chinese government seeks to distance itself from imported rivals.

The new operating system created by the Chinese government will hit desktops first when its released in October, according to a report from Reuters, and will hopefully supplant Windows, OS X and Chrome OS as the top desktop operating system in China within one to two years, with a mobile version planned as well.

Until today, Google had free apps for making documents and spreadsheets on iOS: Google Docs and Google Sheets. To complete the trifecta, Google Slides has been released in the App Store for creating Powerpoint-like presentations.

Google is gunning hard at Apple’s iWork apps and Microsoft’s Office 365 suite. Docs, Sheets and Slides are not only completely free, but they have offline mode and the ability to convert and edit Microsoft Office files.

Dong Ngyugen’s highly anticipated follow-up to Flappy Bird finally landed on iOS last week, but after months of waiting for an addictive new 8-bit game, fans found Swing Copters to be Ngyugen’s most impossible game yet.

To make Swing Copters slightly less impossible and a few degrees more enjoyable, Ngyugen released an update this morning, tweaking the gameplay so that your little copter is able to make a few more corrections before flying through the diabolical maze of swinging hammers and propeller-annihilating green steel bars.

In today’s Cult of Mac TV video we go hands-on with the Swing Copters update that certainly doesn’t make the game easy, but does manage to put the gameplay on par with Flappy Bird’s addictiveness.

Check out the Cult of Mac TV hands-on review below:

Our ever-popular podcast – The CultCast, hosted by Erfon Elijah – is now on the Cult of Mac TV YouTube channel. It’s a whole new way to digest your favorite 30-minute (-ish!) Apple conversation.

Click the video above to check out the latest podcast, which covers topics like NFC on the iPhone 6, Steve Ballmer landing the perfect job and a mobile payment system for iPhone that will make credit cards obsolete.

Watch the latest episode above and don’t forget to subscribe to Cult of Mac TV to stay up-to-date on all the latest happenings from the world of Apple.

Apple is still reliant on Samsung for many of the iPhone’s internal components, including the fabrication of its almighty A-series processors, but in an effort to secure more processor orders from Apple, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is already ahead of schedule with production of the next-generation A9 processor.