Arguably the most-anticipated game for the new generation of consoles, Destiny aims to be a sci-fi first-person shooter from the same folks who all but created the genre with Halo back in 2001.

Today, Bungie put out the call: pre-order the game now (which is set to launch to retail in September) and get early, exclusive access to the Destiny beta.

PlayStation 4 owners will get to play first, with a July 17th beta launch date, while Xbox One gamers will get to play just a week out on July 23rd. The beta itself will terminate on July 26, with a special event for all gamers who show up on the games servers before the end of the day.

Check out the trailer below for some gorgeous visuals along with a few details.

The weather is getting warmer, the shorts are coming out of the dresser drawers, and the swimming pools are opening up. That can only mean one thing: summer is upon us!

Cult of Mac Deals isn’t about to let that occasion pass by without offering another great deal. That’s why you can get 10 award-winning Mac apps, donate to a good cause, and name your own price with The Summer Blockbuster Mac Bundle!

First-person shooter Borderlands 2 offers up a ton of guns and a huge, open-world map with more in-jokes and Easter eggs than you can shake a boom-stick at. With the help of our friends over at Aspyr (publisher of the Mac version of the game), we’re going to share with you four of the hardest-to-find secrets from within the post-apocalyptic sci-fi video game.

Plus, read till the end and you’ll get a special deal exclusively for Cult of Mac readers who want their own copy of the Game of the Year edition of Borderlands 2 (the one with all the DLC packs along with the basic game) at a heavily discounted price.

AirDrop, the wireless file sharing technology built into OS X, is fantastic when it works for the occasional file, but it can be a bit finicky.

For power users who constantly find themselves sharing files online, we recommend Dropzone, a great little Mac App that can significantly boost the ease with which you share files between computers, and drag-and-drop files in general.

Now, Dropzone has gotten even better. With Dropzone 3, the app gains a new Drop Bar for temporarily storing files, AirDrop support, as well as integration with Imgur.

For years now, Foxconn has been expressing its interest in replacing its workers with robots, raising the possibility that future iPhones could be built with machines. In fact, in December of 2012, Foxconn quietly began testing a program to replace human workers with iPhone-building robots.

But now, it appears that Foxconn is hitting the accelerator on the program. Foxconn CEO Terry Gou has just told shareholders that they will be deploying some 10,000 “Foxbots” to start building iPhones soon.

Are you the kind of nostalgic soul who looks back at the Underwood, Remington, and Smith-Corona typewriters of yesteryear and sigh plaintively? Yet are you simultaneously a modern tech nerd, who couldn’t go without the conveniences afforded by an iPad or iMac? Well, then, the Qwerkywriter — an 84-key keyboard that looks just like a vintage typewriter — might be just the thing for you.

Most of us couldn’t have been any more excited for the iPhone and iPad. Then again, most of us aren’t the Finnish Prime Minister.

Speaking to Swedish financial newspaper Dagens Industri, Prime Minister Alexander Stubb has accused Apple’s late-founder Steve Jobs of crushing his country’s job market with two innovations that caught Finland completely off-guard.

“We had two pillars we stood on: one was the IT industry, the other one was the paper industry,” Stubb said — noting that both were affected by the arrival of Apple’s smartphone and tablet combo in the mid-2000s.

iOS 8’s Handoff feature looks totally rad. Imagine starting off a task on your Mac and then being able to continue where you left off on your iPhone or iPad without waiting. Just pick up the device and everything has already synced.

But wait! There’s no need to imagine this, because you can already do it right now, and you don’t even need iCloud. Handoff looks truly useful, and will blur the lines between our devices more than ever before, but let’s take a look at some apps that already work seamlessly between platforms.

July 4th may be (sadly) over, but Apple’s latest mobile OS is all too happy to tell you when the national holiday might be. It could be lying, though.

iOS 7.1.2 features a bug in its Calendar app, which gives the wrong list of holidays in certain countries. The bug was first spotted by an iPad user in Lithuania, who claims that Apple has acknowledged the error.

The iPhone 6 is promising to be thinner, lighter and have a bigger, brighter display than any iPhone before… but no matter how advanced the next iPhone is, rumors still peg it as sucking the juice it needs to run through a Lightning cable.

Meanwhile, there are tons of Android and Windows Phone smartphones that charge using wireless technology. When is Apple going to catch up?

This concept by designer Vishal Bhaunushali for what he calls the iPhone 6 Pro imagines an iPhone that wirelessly charges when placed in close proximity to an aluminum, Apple-branded puck, similarly to most current wireless charging solutions.

And even cooler? He imagines a Smart iView cover that not only protects the screen of your iPhone, but can show you the current date, time and charge level of your iPhone, without ever waking up the device.

Check out the full video below.

On Sunday, South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission on Sunday ordered both Google and Apple to make changes to their Android and iOS app store policies, to make after-purchase refunding more friendly to consumers.

Under the new terms, Google will need to establish a refund system based on developers’ individual policies, while Apple must send out notifications to App Store users every time the company updates its contract terms and conditions.

It’s easy to poke fun at Microsoft when it comes up with its own knockoff version of an Apple’s long-awaited iWatch, iPad, iPhone, iPod, or pretty much any other innovation in the company’s history. However, when it comes up with its own ideas, it kind of makes us think that “thinking different” isn’t really in Microsoft’s DNA at all.

According to a recently filed patent application, Redmond’s latest Apple slaying idea is for something Apple hasn’t expressed any apparent interest in: a mood changing/health device in the form of a robotic butterfly. Yes, really.

True Blood’s seventh and final season continues tonight with the third episode of the season: “Fire In The Hole.”

Death comes to us all, and that’s no empty promise with this series. Reverend Daniels calls it out: “Death is a dark and blinded motherf-cker, whether you see it coming or you don’t,” he tells Sam Merlotte.

This week’s episode is all about love. Sookie’s unequal love for Alcide, Pam’s love for Eric, Sam’s love for his lost fiancee and unborn child, Reverend Daniel’s love for Lettie May, and Andy’s love for his daughter Adilyn. All the characters act out of love and sometimes lust, but even the good guys are going to need more than blind faith in each other to survive.

Spoilers below, so consider yourself warned.

As the week winds down, Cult of Mac Deals wants to highlight some of the best deals that were offered in the past week.

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While Google and Samsung’s smart watches seem designed with function over form in mind, it looks like Apple’s iWatch will be more of a luxury fashion item. A key executive from TAG Heuer, a Swiss watch maker, has been hired by Apple to help market its upcoming wearable.

Along with this latest hire, Apple has been slowly building a team of fashion industry experts who will be instrumental in making the iWatch a commercial success.

If you are like most people, you have a number of connected devices in your home or business. Of course, you have your iPhone, your computer, and you probably have an iPad or two kicking around also.

Wouldn’t it be great to have one keyboard that will easily work with all three without having to reconfigure the Bluetooth settings every time? That’s why you need to enter the Multi-Sync Keyboard Giveaway from Cult of Mac Deals. It’s free!

USA! USA! On this festive 4th-of-July CultCast: Apple prepares to kill-off Aperture and iPhoto; Siri might soon understand us all better; Apple maps stops getting you lost; and did you know Steve Jobs always ate lunch alone like a sad Keanu? We’ll tell you the story. Plus, we reveal our favorite 4th activities, and a weird breakthrough app has us texting Hodor to all our friends! Gods be good.

Grab your sparklers and catch up on this 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 festivities begin.

Our thanks to TextExpander for supporting this episode! TextExpander for Mac saves you time and effort by expanding short abbreviations into frequently-used text, pictures, code blocks, and more, and it’s an application we use every single day. Try it out for free at Smilesoftware.com/cultcast.

The internet is a valuable resource with which to conduct business, study, and play. However, while you are happily surfing the web, sinister elements at every turn threaten to steal your data or render it useless.

That’s why you need to protect yourself with the world’s most popular security, privacy, and access application: Hotspot Shield Elite, now available for only $39 at Cult of Mac Deals.

The iPhone is far and away the most popular smartphone in the U.S., according to a new report by research firm ComScore. According to ComScore, 169 million cellphone users in the U.S. use smartphones — representing around 70 percent of all mobile users.

Of these, Apple can lay claim to 41.9 percent of users, while runner-up Samsung has captured 27.8 percent of the market. After Samsung, the numbers drop dramatically to 6.5 percent for LG, 6.3 percent for Motorola, and 5.1 percent for HTC.

As excited as a lot of people are about the forthcoming iPhone 6, one of the big sticking points has been the presence of ugly antenna breaks on the back of most of the models we’ve seen so far.

In mockups and alleged leaked production units, these antenna breaks resemble strips of tape, or grout between the line of tiles, and leave Apple’s next generation iPhone not as attractive as it could otherwise be.

Take the Xistera out of its box and you’ll be disappointed. It’s ugly as hell, like a cheap corkscrew, and it looks like it won’t really do much. But hidden in those graceless curves and eye-gouging corners is what a lazier journalist than me would call a “Swiss Army knife of iPhoneography.”

Happy July 4! While you’ve probably got plans with friends and family — or a date with a BBQ — appmakers are hoping you’ll have a bit of time for iOS gaming over the holiday, too.

I’ve written before about how 2014 is shaping up to be a golden age of mobile gaming for Apple users, and to make the deal a little bit sweeter, various popular games are currently being discounted in the App Store to give you something to play over the long weekend.

Which games? Check out our list below for the full details.