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.

The iPhone 6 seems to get nearer and nearer each week as Apple fanboys and other tech enthusiasts await an official reveal date with mounting anxiety, but the age of the iPhone 6 might finally be close at hand. A year’s worth of leaks, rumors, and theories regarding the iPhone 6 are finally about to be put to rest, thanks to sources who revealed this week exactly when we can expect Apple to reveal their next generation iPhone.

Watch today’s Cult of Mac news roundup for all the details on the rumored iPhone 6 keynote date, as well as iOS 8 beta 5 details, and even why one piece of technology has Kanye West filing lawsuits like his name’s Johnnie Cochran.

Of course, don’t forget to subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube and catch all our latest videos.

A federal judge has rejected the $324.5 million settlement Apple and others have agreed to pay after facing accusations that the company colluded with Silicon Valley’s top tech firms to avoid poaching each other’s employees.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh rejected the proposed settlement from Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe, saying that the total amount “falls below the range of reasonableness.”

Apple is bringing some much needed relief to your wallet with the addition of iOS 8’s new Family Sharing feature that lets your friends and family enjoy the apps you’ve paid for without purchasing them again, and to make it clear which apps support the new feature, Apple has added some extra info in iTunes and the App Store.

Apple has donated 10 million yuan ($1.6 million) to support relief efforts in China following the major earthquake in the country’s Yunnan Province earlier this week.

The 6.5-magnitude earthquake is the worst disaster to have hit the area in a century, and resulted in the deaths of 615 people. A further 2,400 were injured in the quake, while rescuers have evacuated 230,000 further people, who are now displaced from their home.

Apple has updated its Chinese homepage to reflect the disaster, and Tim Cook personally sent out an email to Apple employees noting that the company is eager to hit with relief efforts.

Creating iOS applications for your business or project is a smart thing to do. Really smart. Some don’t do it, however, because it’s either too expensive or too time intensive.

If you want to get into designing iOS apps, then check out Cult of Mac Deals today. They have three deals on now for a combined 80% off that’ll give you the tools needed to design killer apps. What’s better, they’ll make designing iOS apps easier and will save you cash!

We already know that once iOS 8 comes around, AgileBit’s password manager 1Password is going to be great. Not only will it use Touch ID to make remembering your password a thing of the past, but it will integrate with third party apps.

Pretty cool. The only problem, though, is that 1Password for iOS generally retails at $17.99. Pretty expensive. But for a limited time only, 1Password is going on sale for just $9.99… and in case you’re wondering, yes, the Touch ID compatible iOS 8 version will be a free update if you buy it at this price. And that’s not all: 1Password’s sister app for Mac is also currenly on sale for just $34.99, down from a cool $50.

If you have any dreams of being able to surplant all your internet passwords with your fingerprint come iOS 8, I suggest you get a move on.

Source: iTunes

Sporting a larger screen size, case redesign and various under-the-hood improvements, the iPhone 6 is widely expected to be the biggest refresh of Apple’s smartphone in years. That anticipation is having a major knock-on effect with Apple’s component makers, too.

We reported last month that Apple has placed an unprecedented number of orders for the iPhone 6, and that seems to be backed up by recently announced July sales for Taiwan-based Apple casing supplier Catcher Technology.

Based on growth in the Apple-driven smartphone sector, the company had its second best month in history, with monthly earnings of $154.6 million. This marks a whopping 36.8 percent increase compared to the same month in 2013.

Everyone wants to make a mint in the App Store. But while some developers slave away in coding dens on original ideas, others see a get-rich-quick shortcut through copying.

The result is an App Store littered with clones, frustrated devs, and Apple stuck playing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole to police the rip-off apps.

Recently the developers of micro-messaging service Yo — this year’s most unlikely App Store success story — were shocked to discover that another eerily-similar app called Yolo was hoovering up its potential downloads.

“I noticed a clone that was an exact replica, including the exact same UI, same App Store screenshots, and same App Store description copied word-for-word,” Yo creator Or Arbel tells Cult of Mac.

Sometimes a video game movie spinoff comes along that is so left field that you you a) check to see that it’s not April Fool’s Day and b) makes you wonder if the developers have actually seen the film in question.

Joining 2004’s Fight Club video game, which turned the epic David Fincher mindf*ck movie into a straightforward beat-em-up, is a new Forrest Gump iOS game, which mutates the beloved Oscar-winning comedy-drama into an endless runner. Yes, really.

Called Run Forrest Run, the game “celebrates” the twentieth anniversary of the movie by stripping it of whatever complexity it had, and transforming it into a game in which Tom Hanks’ simpleton character runs into traffic and collects coins like a “stupid is as stupid does” Super Mario impersonator.

An exhibit full of tortoises with iPads glued to their shells. Is this the next evolutionary stage of the family testudinidae? Hardly. It’s an art exhibit in Colorado’s Aspen Art Museum that has animal activists hopping mad.

Apple has dropped a new version of its iTunes app, solving a continuing problem for podcast listeners where subscribed podcasts stop updating with new episodes.

The iTunes version 11.3.1 refresh also fixes another podcast related issue, which saw iTunes become unresponsive while browsing through different podcast episodes.

Yesterday we wrote about the exciting news that Ace Attorney 5 (known outside Japan as Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies) had landed in the Japanese App Store.

Although it came with no official announcement of an English language release, we noted that we remained hopeful — particularly since the game had already received such a translation for a Nintendo 3DS version in 2013, which went on to be heavily praised by various outlets.

Well,  developers Capcom didn’t keep us in suspense for very long, since already the company has confirmed that English-language audiences can expect to play a version of the hit game “quite soon.”