One of the best things Apple offers for newbie customers is the ability to go into brick-and-mortar retail stores for training sessions.

Looking to improve this service — or at least to speed up the ability for users to make the appropriate reservations — Apple has made changes to its “Learn” webpage, adding an interactive map of its stores along with revised session details.

The changes also integrate workshops such as Youth Programs and One to One training into the existing Concierge reservation system.

As someone who’s never witnessed any paranormal activity, I’d probably crap myself should I ever come across a ghost in real life. Luckily I’ve got the Blackwell adventure games to give me a tidy little taste of the supernatural.

The episodic game series introduces you to the spirit world through the eyes of Rosangela Blackwell, for whom dealing with specters comes as no surprise, thanks to her family’s long history of strange and unexplained happenings. Her story unfolds over five games that were originally released on PC (and ported to Mac). The first three games in the series, recently ported smoothly and successfully to iOS, introduce us to a brilliantly told story driven by dialogue and character interaction, with many problem-solving elements.

Beats may have been acquired by Apple for $3 billion earlier this year, but that doesn’t mean that the trendy headphone maker is ready to adopt the white Jony Ive-favored minimalism of Apple just yet.

While Apple continues to work on its Cupertino “Mothership” headquarters, an article from Fast Company sheds some light on the new Beats campus being renovated from two industrial buildings in Culver City, Los Angeles.

Featuring reception areas, conference rooms, and offices in one building, and a cafeteria, gym, and double-height workshop for R&D in the other, the article describes the design as featuring “architectural gestures that go from pop to cinematic to downright arty.”

One thing it’s not, though, is reminiscent of Apple.

When Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi announced the Mi 4 on Tuesday, we — and pretty much every other site that covered the news — were quick to point out that it bears a slight resemblance to the iPhone. This isn’t the first time Xiaomi has been influenced by Apple, either. In fact, the company is often referred to as the “Chinese Apple.”

And yet, despite all that, Xiaomi global vice president Hugo Barra, who used to be in charge of Google’s Android division, has dismissed any likeness to the Cupertino company, and says he’s “sick and tired” of the Xiaomi being labeled an Apple copycat.

Based on the evidence, I have to say I disagree.

Early doodles on the iPad looked a lot like this generation’s Etch-a-Sketch.

But in just a few years, after celebrated artists such as David Hockney have shown their iPad works in galleries, Apple’s revolutionary device has come into its own as a canvas.

The eclectic group of works above are finalists in the second annual Mobile Digital Art Exhibition (aka MDAC Summit 2014), an upcoming art-packed weekend of workshops and a celebration of digital art in Palo Alto, a stone’s throw from Apple headquarters. Take a gander and vote on them by July 31 for the People’s Choice Award.

Released earlier this year, Blizzard’s Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft manages to do what many would have thought impossible: out MtG Magic: The Gathering.

An astonishingly addictive collectible card game, Hearthstone‘s only failing, if you could call it that, is it was for all intents and purposes multiplayer-only. But today, Blizzard has rectified that by releasing its highly anticipated Curse of Naxxramas expansion for the game on both Mac and iPad.

Best of all? It’s free. Or, at least, the first taste is.

Jeff Bezos may be ready to roast the Galaxy and iPhone with his much-discussed Amazon Fire Phone, but judging from the first round of reviews, the handset is more of a damp squib than a firestarter.

Ahead of the smartphone’s launch tomorrow, and with the embargo lifted on the early review unit handsets, we’ve finally got an idea of how Bezos’ intriguing pet project has panned out.

And, unfortunately, “panned” seems to be the right word to describe it.

A group of former retail and corporate Apple employees are suing the iPhone-maker for alleged violations of the California Labor Code, claiming Apple never granted timely meal or rest breaks, and failed to promptly send out final paychecks as well.

The case was just bumped up to class-action status yesterday, opening it up to a trial by jury as the case expands to include over 20,000 current and former Apple employees in the state who could be affected by the ruling.

The latest OS X Yosemite beta, pushed to developers Monday, brings a few more tweaks to Apple’s upcoming Mac operating system.

In today’s video you’ll get a quick look at the updates in OS X Yosemite beta 4, including changes to Dark Mode, a new calculator and a refreshed iTunes. With the public beta of OS X Yosemite rumored to be just around the corner, Mac fans should be getting excited about the operating system’s great looks and many functional upgrades.

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

iPhones and iPads are remarkably simple to use. And yet they are also incredibly powerful — and incredibly complicated — devices. Sometimes getting them to do exactly what you want isn’t as straightforward as you might like.

In today’s video, we show you five basic iOS tips that will make using your mobile Apple devices much easier. Edit documents, keep snoops at bay and more by using these easy and effective tips that every iOS owner should know.

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

Even Apple execs sounded pleasantly surprised as they revealed last quarter’s mostly higher-than-expected numbers Tuesday. But in what’s become something of a refrain in Cupertino, they couldn’t stop themselves from vague and knowing references to the incredible products waiting in the magical Apple pipeline.

Trust us, they seemed to say: Last quarter’s net profit of $7.7 billion — fueled by robust sales of iPhones, MacBooks and a surprisingly strong showing in the iTunes Software and Services category — was totally great, but wait till you see what we’ve got up our sleeves.

“We’re expecting a very busy fall,” said Luca Maestri, Apple’s chief financial officer. “We’re very excited about what’s in the pipeline.”

What else did Apple executives have to say during Tuesday’s Q3 earnings call? Here’s our take on everything you need to know from the latest numbers talk.

Apple fell just shy of Wall Street’s third-quarter revenue predictions but came in well within its own guidance, bringing in $37.4 billion gross and $7.7 billion in profit for Q3 2014.

iPhone sales were modest at best, but that’s probably because everyone is waiting for the iPhone 6 in September.

Apple sold 35 million iPhones, 13.2 million iPads and 4.4 million Macs in the just-ended quarter, the company announced Tuesday just prior to its Q3 earning call. That’s decent for what’s traditionally the company’s slowest quarter of the year, but they’re not numbers to sing about—which is why Apple is steering everyone’s attention to what it has planned for the coming months.

Tim Cook and newly-apointed CFO Luca Maestri are getting ready for Apple’s Q3 2014 earnings call with investors. The call will reveal just how much cash the company raked in over the past three months and what they should expect later this year. We’ll be right here, liveblogging the whole thing.

Apple hasn’t released a new product this quarter, but investors on Wall Street are still bullish about the future of AAPL, sending the company’s stock price surging 26% since its last earnings report.

Whether Apple was able to beat expectations of $38.4 billion in revenue without an explosion of new sales will finally be known today at 2 p.m. Pacific, and we’ll be ready to dish out all the news and juicy tidbits Tim and the team tell investors.

So keep this page open for the full scoop on how ridiculously profitable Apple was last quarter, as well as what’s to come its “most exciting product pipeline in 25 years.”

With a great quarter behind Apple and massive refreshes of both iOS and OS X in the near future (along with a little something called the iPhone 6) Tim Cook is unlikely to have a lack of things to crow about during today’s earnings call.

If he is, however, maybe he can bring up the fact that — despite increased competition — the iPad is still driving a massive majority of tablet web usage, as measured through ad impressions.

The data was collected by research firm Chitika Insights, who sampled tens of millions of U.S. and Canadian ad impressions between July 1 and 7 this year. They found that the iPad accounts for 78.0% of all tablet ad impressions — up from the 77.2% the iPad represented back in April, and one of the largest quarter-over-quarter increases for any tablet brand.

Imagine a world in which you can watch, search, and share anything from every The Simpsons episode, ever. If you were Homer Simpson, the dim-witted but lovable (and alcoholic child-strangler) father on the 25-year-old animated sitcom created by Matt Groening, you might drool at the prospect.

For the rest of us, though, we might explode with glee with the upcoming Simpsons World, an app and service that will indeed contain every single episode of The Simpsons, ever, in a searchable and share-able format. Now you can finally use official clips to add meaning and cultural relevance to every one of your reddit comment threads with ease.

Facing the end of his long, dominant NBA career, Kobe Bryant is branching out into the business world with Kobe Inc., and while he’s picked the brains of people like Oprah, Hillary Swank and Arianna Huffington, it was a meeting with Jony Ive at Apple Campus earlier this summer that caught the web’s attention.

What could one of the greatest basketball players of all-time learn from the world’s most famous designer? According to an interview with Bloomberg, the Black Mamba simply wanted to know how Ive approaches design and how he manages to see the world differently than everyone that makes hardware.

An NBA superstar reaching out to the world’s tech designer for help sounds like an odd fit, but Bryant says building an iPhone isn’t too different from developing a world-class basketball game because like building products, you approach both sequentially, piece by piece, to make it unstoppable.

Here’s the full interview:

Apple’s Siri virtual assistant is getting better all the time, but Google Now still takes the biscuit, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.

Munster ran both virtual assistants through a battery of tests, and shared the results in a new research note, published Tuesday. He concluded that Android’s voice search correctly answers questions asked 84 percent of the time, while Apple’s Siri follows up behind with a still impressive 82 percent correct rate.

Our world is a connected one. Nearly everyone has a mobile device and we are expected to be connected at all times. When we are driving, though, it’s not safe to be holding our smartphones while making calls. In some places it’s even illegal. That’s why it is important to have a mounting device in your car that keeps your attention on the road instead of on your phone.

For a mounting device, you can’t go wrong with either The Universal Car Mount or The GripGo, now available and priced right at Cult of Mac Deals.

Almost five years after the original Angry Birds game made its debut, Rovio is keeping things fresh with a new update that adds 15 brand new levels. All are based on fan-favorite episodes, and they’re available now on both Android and iOS.

If you have a MacBook Air from mid-2011, you may have noticed intermittent issues where your laptop has a harder time waking up from sleep mode than it normally would have done, and when it does, the fans might loudly blast as if the whole laptop were on fire.

Although rare, these issues have been afflicting customers for at least the last couple of years. But it seems like Apple has finally figured out what’s wrong, as a new update today specifically for mid-2011 MacBook Air owners fixes the longstanding issues.

If you’re an iPhone user based in Europe, you’re going to have greater control over data roaming when iOS 8 makes its public debut this fall. Apple has added the ability to toggle Internet connectivity specifically alongside the general data roaming switch in its latest iOS 8 beta.

A pretty sketchy rumor coming out of China claims that the new model iPad mini 3 might borrow the “Air” moniker of its bigger brother, and be a whopping 30 percent thinner than its predecessor.

The report also claims that this new iPad mini Air will rely on the as-yet-unnannounced A8 processor currently manufactured by TSMC.

Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is pretty much everything wrong with mobile development, in a nutshell. A freemium game that invites users to waste ungodly amounts of money on stupid in-app purchases, the game is on track to make $200 million this year alone.

But it does have its fans. For example. the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Office Of Water, which sent out a tweet Monday night telling everyone that it had reached the status of “C-List Celebrity” in Kim Kardashian: Hollywood.