The relationship between Apple Computers and Apple Records (the Beatles’ record label) has always been tumultuous. Bringing suit against Apple early in the Mac-maker’s history for their similar names, an agreement was struck that Apple could use its iconic fruit name only if it didn’t get into the music game… an agreement Apple disregarded when it launched iTunes. That move kept the Beatles off of iTunes until a deal was finally struck in 2010.

Things between Apple and the Beatles have been pretty rosy since. In fact, a new Beatles album comprised of rare recording and bootlegs will ll launch later this week exclusively through iTunes.

Budding musicians out there in the Cult of Macosphere may be interested to check out new app, Caustic, which promises to offer an impressive rack-mount synthesizer for iOS, featuring a total of 14 different machines and multiple effects.

Think the Ashton Kutcher-starring Jobs, and the forthcoming Aaron Sorkin biopic are the only Steve Jobs-related projects doing the Hollywood rounds? Think again.

In the wake of the news concerning the 15-year-old employee who died after working on the iPhone 5c production line, Apple supplier Pegatron has revealed the high tech measures it goes to in order to avoid hiring underage workers.

According to Pegatron, the Taiwanese manufacturing firm has been employing facial recognition technology since earlier this year to screen for such an occurrence.

When you’re the most-watched tech company in existence, there’s nothing quite like taking people by surprise.

And although Apple’s “12 Days of Gifts” app — this year available to U.S. customers for the first time — was due to kick off on December 26, Apple has decided to give downloaders a taste of what it is to come by offering Lorde’s new single “No Better” as a pre-Christmas gift.

I just spent a week traveling with my Retina iPad mini, and there are a few things I learned. One is that you don’t have to worry about charging it like you did with the first full-sized retina iPad, the iPad 3 – the new retina mini can be juiced in a few hours tops. Another thing is that I like to have a good protective case for when I stuff the iPad into an already-full backpack.

But I don’t want a bulky cover that sticks around when I’m actually using the iPad. And this is where the new VersaPouch Mini Stand Case comes in.

The peeps behind Kaspersky Labs’ Securelist blog have uncovered an Easter Egg in Safari, which they claim lists user IDs and passwords in plaintext.

The problem relates to Safari’s retention of browser history as used in the “Reopen All Windows from Last Session” feature — which enables users to easily revisit sites they opened during previous Safari sessions.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, and maybe into the 1990s (I spent much of that decade drunk, so it’s all a little hazy), there was a phrase that could turn even the toughest and most sociable of us into terrified, dread-filled jellies. You would be invited to a friends house for drinks and maybe dinner, to celebrate their successful return from a trip to the furthest corners of the world.

You’d be all set, happy to see them and spend some time chatting over drinks, and then the words would come. “There will be a slideshow.”

In the times of film, this meant a darkened room, a humming projector and lots of very dull commentary. And after dinner, it was almost impossible to stay awake.

Which brings me to the new The Projecteo Gift Set, which is either an awesome modern-day take on the slideshow, or a way to get revenge on your show-off friends from decades past. It could even be both…

The TabHandler is another handle that sticks to the back of your iPad, only it beats the competition in a few ways: First, the permanent circular mount is small enough not to annoy when attached. Second, the handle is almost absurdly useful in its range of positions. And third, the voiceover guy on the video sounds amazing, like he should be selling saddles and lassos to cowboys, not iPad accessories to soft-skinned cubicle-dwelling troglodytes (cublodytes) like us.

In our original Hidden Radio review, we said that the little twist-to-open Bluetooth speaker looked great, but sounded a little tinny and lacked any way to control playback and iPhone volume from the unit itself.

These have bother been fixed on the new Hidden Radio 2, but the speaker (and radio) [UPDATE: The Hidden Radio 2 no longer contains a radio] still looks as great as ever.

You know how most image editing apps have a “paint” filter that supposedly makes you photo look like it was actually made with oils or watercolors? And you know how they all – ALL – suck? Then Waterlogue is going to utterly amaze you, as it’s the first app I’ve seen that gives results that really look like a watercolor painting.

Then again, as the app comes from the folks behind Popsicolor and Percolator, it’s not that surprising that it’s so damned good.

You know all those tripods we feature here on Cult of Mac? Maybe you have a stack of them at home, or maybe you just have one of them, stuck at the back of the coat closet and generally never getting used. Or maybe you don;t even have a closet to keep it in, and you just keep tripping overt it on the way to make you coffee every morning.

Enlight’s new Phlite is here to help. It’ll let you leave your tripod permanently erected in the living room, without anyone complaining. How? Let’s see…

Your Apple products are pinnacles of modern design and technology, so why waste your time with Apple accessories that aren’t up to snuff? Saving precious dollars, you say?Well with this Cult of Mac Deals offer you’ll get huge savings plus top quality products – and this sleek, high-quality MacStand Bundle is another example of such a promotion.

Included in thsi bundle are the Mtable™, a multi-purpose desktop stand, and the Xtand Go™, a flexible in-car gadget mount. And you’ll get this bundle for just $79.99 – a savings of 38%!

Sam’s Club is offering the 16GB iPhone 5s for only $119 through January, which is the lowest price out there we could find right now. The deal requires a two-year carrier contract with either AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, or US Cellular.

You would normally have to be a Sam’s Club member to take advantage of this discount, but outsiders can shop and pay non-member prices as part of the Friends & Family Open House that lasts December 13th through the 15th. So today is the last day for non-members to get the full benefit of the deal. Sam’s Club previously had the 5s marked down at $147.

A lot of retailers are discounting Apple’s latest iPhones for the holidays, so now is a great time to buy. Walmart is selling the iPhone 5c for $27 and the 5s for $127 until December 24th. Best Buy has a great holiday deal running where it will knock $75 off any iPhone 5s regardless of storage capacity on AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint, which is the best option if you want something larger than 16GB.

MarkDrop is a new Markdown editor for the Mac that displays a minimalistic editor on the left and a preview window on the right that updates in real time. The app prides itself on a clean interface, and you can share via PDF, HTML, or print.

Tired of the way your smartphone, tablet, computer, or other tech gadgets are looking these days? Now you can change it up with a stylish skin from Slickwraps.

Slickwraps makes amazing skins for these big name brands and more! They literally make hundreds of sweet skins for just about every tech gadget out there including your iPhone and/or Android phone. This Cult of Mac Deals offer will get you $40 Slickwraps credit for only $20 – credit you can apply to any product (or products) they have for sale on their website. This deal gives you the freedom to shop around and get exactly what you want.

Car makers next year will begin selling vehicles that support Apple’s new system for connecting iPhones to the in-car entertainment systems built into the dash.

Nice, but it doesn’t go far enough. Here’s why Apple should start building the in-car entertainment systems themselves.

iOS 7 has ushered in a new age of design for third-party Twitter apps. Before Jony Ive’s monumental redesign of iOS was introduced over the summer, apps capitalized on making themselves stand out with a distinct design aesthetic—the robotic, chromatic look of the old Tweetbot, for example.

Several of the biggest Twitter clients in the App Store have undergone their iOS 7 redesigns by now, and while they feel more at home in iOS 7, they’ve also become harder to tell apart at first glance. The launch of Osfoora 2 for iPhone this past week reinforces this design trend.

Andrew Ambrosino, the same concept designer who showed us what the next version of OS X could look like, also has an interesting take on the Apple TV’s interface. His concept design is inspired by Jony Ive’s iOS 7.

“I know, it’s a Samsung TV so it can’t be a “real” Apple TV / iTV concept,” notes Ambrosino, “but unfortunately I just lack the skill for hardware.”

While accepting a lifetime achievement award from Auburn University, his alma mater, Apple CEO Tim Cook told of how The Ku Klux Klan, Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy shaped his passion for human rights and equality. “Growing up in Alabama in the 1960s, I saw the devastating impacts of discrimination,” Cook said in New York on December 10th. “Remarkable people were denied opportunities and treated without basic human dignity solely because of the color of their skin.”

He recalled childhood memories of watching crosses burn on neighbors’ lawns in Alabama. “This image was permanently imprinted in my brain and it would change my life forever,” Cook said. “For me the cross burning was a symbol of ignorance, of hatred, and a fear of anyone different than the majority. I could never understand it, and I knew then that America’s and Alabama’s history would always be scarred by the hatred that it represented.”

You can watch the full speech below the fold:

Finally, a Bluetooth® speaker made for on-the-go lifestyles. With an integrated omnidirectional microphone, The PULSE combines music-playing and conference-calling capabilities in a palm-sized package.

Weighing in at only 2.3 ounces, it attaches almost anywhere with the included clip – backpacks, seatbelts, pockets – so it’s always available, but never in the way. And for a limited time you can get it for just $79.99 – a savings of 19% – courtesy of Cult of Mac Deals!

It’s the time of the year for lists: naughty, nice, best of, trends, Thirteen Surprising Bathroom Habits Of Tech Innovators. Stuff like that.

All those listicles can make your eyes water, even though you can’t stop yourself from clicking through to Ten Loudest Grunters in Women’s Tennis, I know I can’t.

But it was with great pleasure that I spotted Cult of Mac publisher Leander Kahney’s Jony Ive made it into the venerable Wall Street Journal’s Books of the Year section.

This week on the CultCast—its layout, its machinery, and the creative people and processes that build the amazing products we love—we go behind the veil of Apple’s insanely secretive design studio. Plus, how to get great paid apps for free (it’s legal, promise!), and could an Apple/Microsoft merger be in our future? One analyst thinks so…

Have a few laughs whilst getting caught up on each week’s finest Apple stories! Download new and past episodes of The CultCast on iTunes or hit play below and let the audio enjoyment commence.

Thanks to lynda.com for sponsoring this episode. Learn at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at lynda.com.

Compassion and Tech go hand in hand in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine.

We’re all supposed to be better people around the holidays. Unless we happen to be a hackathon dude who fires off a Facebook rant about how San Francisco is filled with human trash. 

And, sure, you can delete that stupid stuff. But that same technology that enabled you to quickly air your most callous, thoughtless opinion won’t take it back that easily. His subsequent apology did little to smother the flames about how tech needs better PR to convince the world we aren’t the philosophical disciples of Charles Montgomery Burns.

That’s why Facebook is considering a compassion button – so in this case you could sympathize with your hackathon pal for his complete lack of empathy for the homeless? – for example.

This week, Cult of Mac reports from the front line of digital companies and nonprofits with heart and soul from Stanford’s inaugural Technology and Compassion Conference.  The idea behind it is to bring things like mood trackers and compassion training to our iPhones, so we act like jerks a little less. And the world will thus becomes a better place…

We also bring you the best new books, music and movies in iTunes and apps in the store as well as the inside scoop from the behind the counter with our Ask a Genius Column. ‘Cause we’re generous like that.

Cult of Mac Magazine in iTunes.

Apple EarPods are sleek and gorgeous. For most people like me though, they fallout all the time. Moshi has released its new Mythro earbuds that promise to stay in-place while still sounding good at an affordable price, so we’ve decided to put them through the ringer to see if they’re a suitable cheap earbud alternative. While we’re at it, we also take a look at Moshi’s first ever iPad charger, the IonBank 10k. It’s light, white, and sleek all over, but does it have enough juice to make it worth carrying around? Check out our findings below: