Apple’s first foray into wearables is expected to be revealed this October, but Apple’s not the only tech giant preparing a smartwatch for this fall: New rumors claim Microsoft has plans for its own wearable, only it won’t look anything like the big bulky bands we just saw at Google I/O.

We first got wind that Microsoft was readying its own iPhone-friendly smartwatch last month, but a report from Tom’s Hardware sheds new light on what the device will look like when it hits the market with an ungodly number of sensors.

This post was brought to you by Anvsoft, creator of M4VGear.

Do you want to copy or convert your videos, TV shows and music videos to other formats so that they can be watched on all your devices? Currently, movies purchased or rented on the iTunes store are DRM encrypted so as to restrict their viewing to Apple devices and iTunes. Moreover, if Apple pulls a video from iTunes, it can no longer be accessed even though the viewer purchased it.

M4VGear DRM Media Converter is the fastest DRM remover on the market. This software package can remove DRM from your iTunes movie library 20 times faster and converts iTunes M4V video files to unprotected mp4 format with perfect output quality for iOS. Watch the video here.

Apple has launched a new $49 Mac Pro Security Lock Adapter in its online store, giving Mac Pro owners (and Apple Stores) an easy way to secure their machines with existing Kensington locks.

Apple’s lock adapter is a straightforward metal bracket that secures the Mac Pro’s lift-off cover to the machine’s base by way of a security cable, thereby barring access to the machine’s internals. The cable lock can then be secured to make it difficult for thieves to steal the $3,000-plus machine.

Samsung’s newly-launched flagship Galaxy S5 might have hoped to capture some of the iPhone’s market dominance in Britain, but new research figures show that even in its first month it trailed behind sales of the iPhone 5s and even Apple’s so-called “flop” iPhone 5c.

The numbers were crunched by research company Kantar Worldpanel, which looked at smartphone sales in the month of May. The Galaxy S5 did manage to convert a few former iOS users to become Android fans, with 17 percent of new S5 owners being former iPhone users.

Even this news is unlikely to worry Apple (or make Samsung particularly cheerful), however:

From sledgehammer-tossing freedom fighters to misunderstood teenagers at Christmas, Apple’s TV commercials have hit us with some truly iconic imagery over the years. But when a company has been around since the 1970s, it’s no great surprise that a select few ads would slip our collective memory.

After scouring through hundreds of big-time commercials and tiny TV spots that promoted Cupertino’s products over the years, here are our picks for the Apple advertisements that time forgot. All of them are worthy of a second look — and almost all of them for the right reasons.

If you had an old iPhone you planned to trade in for a discount with Apple, you may have missed the chance to maximize your reimbursement. That’s because Apple has slashed the maximum value for old handsets on its iPhone trade-in program to $225 — representing a decrease of $45.

The change is reportedly set to come into effect at Apple Stores in the U.S. and Canada, and will likely roll out to other international retail venues after that. So far, Apple’s iPhone trade-in scheme operates at retail stores in the U.S., United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, France, and Italy.

Ubiquitous cloud storage and editing solutions for your photos are like buses: You wait ages for one, and then two come along at once.

Both Apple and Adobe are going all-in on allowing you to view and edit your photos on any device. Adobe has done this by bringing its Lightroom desktop app to mobile. Apple is doing it by ditching iPhoto and Aperture and starting again with the upcoming Photos app for iOS.

While the approaches are different, they both look rad. And they’ll drive a fundamental shift in the way we manage our photos.

It may be painfully average as a kart game, but the uber popular Angry Birds Go! iOS racer has just upped the ante by finally adding a much-requested multiplayer mode.

Letting you race against other players from around the world to determine the fastest bird or piggy on the track, the presence of multiplayer was first teased by developers Rovio all the way back in December, when they asked: “Who wants to see multiplayer in Angry Birds Go!? It’s coming in spring!”

As it turned out, Rovio missed the spring deadline, but hopefully the extra time to work on the update will have been well-spent.

The Los Angeles Unified School District decided to blow its entire $1 billion tech budget on an iPad for every student last year, but after security hacks and supply issues got the program off to a rocky start, the district has decided to adjust course and let on a few challengers.

Officials at the U.S.’s second-largest school district have decided to allow a group of high schools to choose between six devices instead of the iPad, effectively putting distribution of Apple’s tablet on hold district-wide.

Seven years after the Apple TV launch, Google has announced Android TV software that will work with hardware from companies like Sony and Logitech. But how does the current Apple TV stack up to the new Android TV platform?

Today’s video shows off key features of Google’s latest attempt at ruling the living room, including some advances that might spur Apple to innovate once again when it comes to television. For those interested in watching Apple TV on Android, this shift could mean more accessibility and competition in the streaming space.

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

The entire country is busy watching America’s rebels take on the Belgium Red Devils at World Cup, but while everyone else is focused on the football pitch, Google is busy readying its plans to take on Beats Music with a music service acquisition of its own.

Songza, a music streaming service that specializes in finding the right music to fit your mood – kind of like Beats’ Sentence feature – announced that is has been scooped up by the folks at Google.

For a comic book character that’s been around since 1941, it’s surprising how few women (five) have written DC Comic’s biggest female protagonist. The character is as least as popular and visible as DC’s other superstars, Batman and Superman, but it’s not until recently that we’ve seen her potentially coming to the big screen, while the other two have dominated DC’s movie output in recent years.

It’s exciting, then, to hear that the comic book itself is getting some new creative energy: Meredith and David Finch, a husband and wife writer/illustrator. While David has some serious comic book cred, from Ultimate X-Men (with Brian Michael Bendis) and Batman: The Dark Knight, Meredith Finch has some chops as well, as seen in her short stories for Zenescope Entertainment. This will be her first lead comic writing gig.

Meredith reminds us that having a female writer for one of the most iconic female superheroes is important. “It makes sense if you’re going to try to attract that female market that you appeal to them on every level,” she told USA Today, “– your writing demographic reflects the demographic of your readership.”

Samsung wants to be one of the world’s top 10 places to work by 2020, but according to the latest third-party labor conditions report, working for the South Korean smartphone maker is still a horrible experience, especially if you’re one of its Chinese suppliers.

An audit of 100 of Samsung’s suppliers in China found issues like overtime, proper saftey gear and training are still prominent issues. You can read the full 69-page report on Samsung’s site, but here’s a quick rundown of the egregious conditions:

Since launching last week, Yo has mostly been a joke of an app with $1 million in funding, a horrifically bad security hole and the best Games of Thrones-themed clone to ever hit the App Store.

Somehow it’s already amassed one million users even though all you’ve been able to do in the app until now is toss Yo!s from one screen to another, but thanks to the addition of IFTTT integration, Yo could actually be pretty useful – if everyone hasn’t deleted it yet.

Following Google’s announcement of Android Auto, Apple has added nine more car makers that will support CarPlay in future models of their vehicles.

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1Password is one third-party app that will directly benefit from Extensibility and Apple’s Touch ID API, two features coming in iOS 8 that will let apps work together like never before.

Made by Canadian app company AgileBits, 1Password acts like a digital vault for storing all your Web logins and sensitive data. 1Password for iOS 8 is already in beta, and AgileBits has taken advantage of Touch ID and the ability to directly integrate with Safari. The result is a frictionless experience that demonstrates how iOS 8 is ushering in a new era of powerful, desktop-class mobile apps.

The park: a place to jog, soak up the sun, and… charge your iPhone? From next week visitors at select parks in the Boston area will be able to charge their mobile devices at special solar-powered benches, dubbed “Soofas.”

“Soofa is the first step into smart urban furniture,” Changing Environments CEO and Soofa co-inventor Sandra Richter says in a statement. “The possibilities to update the city for the mobile generation are endless and long overdue.”

I’m a digital pack rat. I’ve got an iPhone, an iPad mini, a Barnes & Noble nook eReader, a space pen, several USB flash drives, and various earbuds along with a few charging and adapter cables.

I usually just jam all these things into my backpack as I head out the door, hoping they don’t get lost or tangled in the process. They get lost in my bag of choice, and I spend a fair bit of time searching around for stuff I need in any given moment when out and about.

Honestly, though, it hasn’t been much of an issue. I’ve been ok with taking the extra effort to find my headphones, say, and unwrap them from the unholy tangle they’ve become in my bag, for the simple fact that I’m not super organized.

This new leather folio case, however, has me re-thinking all that. What if I could keep track of all the little digital ephemera I carry with me in a more compact, organized way?

Turns out that I can, and look great doing it.

Talk about quick off the mark! iOS 7.1.2 may have only just been released, but the Pangu jailbreak (which offers an untethered solution for iOS 7.1.x-powered Apple devices) is already compatible with the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system.

This means that it is safe for jailbreakers to update to the latest version of iOS, before re-jailbreaking their iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with the same Pangu method.

As the first new product line launched under Tim Cook, most people realize how significant the iWatch is going to be for Apple. But research firm ABI Research thinks it’s also going to be make or break for the wearables market.

Crunching figures, ABI points out that “smartwatch” shipments for the first quarter of 2014 was an unimpressive 510,000 units — with the top four players being Samsung, Sony, Pebble and Casio. ABI suggests that users are holding off on picking up wearables until the launch of the iWatch.

This is how my non-gamer girlfriend shows me which games are worth playing: She stays up until 3 a.m., wearing down the iPad mini battery to 22 percent while she tries to solve the next level.

This time, she bathed our dark bedroom in colorful reflected light while she moved Niko, Groggnar, Eek and Claude around on the screen in Monsters Ate My Birthday Cake. If it’s so important to solve environmental puzzles on the bright screen in the middle of the night, I know the game’s addictive.

This morning, still playing on the couch after charging up the iPad while she (finally) got some sleep, she told me like it is.

“It took me 15 minutes, but I finally got that level,” she bragged. “With three stars, bitch.”

SAN FRANCISCO — The iPhone has changed the way we do everything, from finding a date to finding a meal. Now it’s about to change the way innovative hardware gets made.

With smartphones manufactured in such massive quantities, basic components like chips and batteries have become dirt cheap. Smartphones also allow hardware to be dumber by providing processing power and a big screen. Add 3-D printers (which ease prototyping), crowdfunding (which has shaken up financing) and Github (for sharing software), and you’ve got a smartphone-fueled manufacturing revolution in the making.

“It’s the cellphone peace dividend,” said Brady Forrest, a former venture capitalist who heads up Highway1, an “incubator” for hardware startups that launched a few months ago here in the city’s Mission district. “So many are being made, prices for components are plummeting.”

As expected, Apple’s website is currently advertising the company’s “Back to School” promotion.

Details about the promotion appeared early today, following a period during which the Apple Online Store was temporarily closed for business. Much like last year, Apple is offering students free gift cards of varying amounts when they purchase a Mac, iPhone, or iPad. A Mac purchase will net customers a $100 Apple Store Gift Card, while iPhone and/or iPad purchases will be rewarded with a $50 gift card.