This week on the CultCast: Leander’s Big Adventure! Leander’s back to tell us about his top-secret mission to Apple HQ. Plus, CoM reviews editor Charlie Sorrell tells us about some cool gear he’s reviewing. We also run through a list of all the great hardware we’re expecting Apple to dump on us in just a few short months. And we wrap up with an all-new Get to Know Your Cultist, and this round has us diving into some of our favorite movies ever made. Guess who has the weird choice? You’re right, it’s Leander.

Hem and haw 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.

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Click on for the show notes.

It seems like ages ago that the original iPod touch helped boost the popularity of iOS. With seven years behind the device, Apple still believes in the product and has introduced a price cut. Watch today’s news roundup to hear all about the latest version of the iTouch. You’ll also get the latest iPhone 6 rumors, a look at Google’s wacky cardboard virtual reality goggles and the rest of this week’s big stories.

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Cult of Mac Deals has lined up a tremendous offer that will help you take the iOS apps ideas you’ve conjured up into something very real.

With The Untouchable iOS 7 Dev Master Bundle, you’ll get 6 in-depth courses and over 70 hours of app creation training. That’s right – you’ll get a training package worth over $900 for only $79 during this limited time offer from Cult of Mac Deals.

Yesterday, Apple quietly updated the 16GB iPod Touch, adding a rear-camera to the base model device while dropping the price of the entire line by $30 to $50 each.

Was anything else new? To find out, the famed gadget vivisectionists at iFixIt ripped apart a new 16GB iPod touch.

Siri’s starting work — or at least something like that. SRI International, the brains behind the Siri standalone app bought by Apple back in 2010, has announced the creation of Kasisto, a business version of Apple’s virtual assistant.

Kasisto will enable companies to integrate their own branded Siri-style assistants within apps, providing a way of letting helping consumers navigate complex tasks through a conversational Artificial Intelligence program. While SRI International has yet to release many details, this means that it should be possible to harness the regular Siri interactions for more specialized tasks within apps, allowing specific businesses to “train” their own version of Siri to become an expert in a variety of areas, from medical advice to, say, movie rentals.

Way better than it sounds iOS collectible card superhero beat-em-up Injustice: Gods Among Us recently received a notable update.

Adding four new challenge characters, players can now expect to confront the likes of Killer Frost, Luchadore Bane, Arkham Origins Deathstroke and Red Son Batman, all of whom will go live in the coming weeks. The interface for challenges has also been reworked, meaning that it’s now a whole lot easier to tell how many challenge levels it is that you’ve completed, and what the rewards are for each one.

Back in August, a new game arrived in the iOS App Store and almost immediately vanished without a trace.

“I received a few great reviews from news sites, but not enough to have an impact,” says Robert Topala, founder of RobTop Games and developer of the disappearing game. “Since I had no marketing budget it quickly dropped in rankings after release.”

For most games that would have been it. And if the story stopped there, it wouldn’t have been a tale of total failure: Topala wasn’t a professional coder, and had only been making mobile games for a couple years at the time. Simply finishing a game, getting it in the App Store and picking up a few accolades would have been nice enough.

But that wasn’t Topala’s story.

With Apple’s mobile and desktop platforms growing closer in iOS 8 and Yosemite, I started wondering: Is the laptop inherently better for computing than a tablet, or does it just seem that way because we’re so used to the folding form factor?

Could it be that, if the iPad had launched before the Mac and we’d spent the last 30 years using touchscreens, we would balk at using keyboards, mice and dumb screens to do our computing work? Or, in my time-reversed world, if Apple unveiled the Mac in 2010, would we all cling to our iPads and claim Cupertino was nuts for foisting OS X upon us?

With so much focus on its iOS devices, it’s easy to forget that Apple is constantly innovating for its Mac product line as well.

On Thursday, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that reveals the company’s investigations into possible future Mac Keyboards which support gesture controls, as well as in-key pictograms, symbols, and glyphs.

A couple of months after debuting its new look iPhone app complete with updated iOS 7 design, The Weather Channel has finally given its iPad app the same treatment — with a new look interface that is “closely aligned to the iOS 7 aesthetic.”

While it’s certainly taken its time (apparently weather apps change a whole lot slower than the weather itself), there’s no disputing that the app looks better than ever, with a flat interface and simple menu that makes this particular meteorology app incredibly easy to use.