Tim Cook stepped up as the CEO of Apple on August 24, 2011. The soft-spoken Southerner, who has worked at the Cupertino company since 1998,  had previously acted as interim CEO when Steve Jobs stepped down to battle cancer.

Cook’s ascent to the permanent CEO position marked a sea change for Apple. Once called the stage manager to Jobs’ star, he’s now running the show. After endless speculation about whether Cook’s rule marked the end of Apple or signaled a bright new era, going by the numbers, it looks like he’s earned a solid B.

Here’s a look at his first three years as the head of Apple, a job he got paid $4.25 million to perform in 2013.

Other than getting to #humblebrag to all your friends that Dr. Dre is your colleague at the top tech company in the world, working for Apple has some serious benefits in the form of cash money.

Apple makes sure to compensate most of its corporate employees enough to at least afford a Tesla. But if you’ve ever been curious how much each position at Apple earns a year, the folks at BusinessVibes created the graph based on data from GlassDoor that ranks over 20 jobs at Apple based on pay from the lowly Mac Genius to Jony Ive’s industrial designers.

The good news for coders ready for a career switch is even software quality assurance engineers start around $92k a year, but of course Apple places the most value on industrial designers who bring home nearly $30k more a year than the 2nd highest paid employees – hardware engineers.

Do you still dream of the day when the iPad and MacBook finally converge in beautiful harmony? Are you also really jazzed about the Apple’s big ass iPad rumors? Well if you’ve got a measly $4000 laying around, Modbook is ready to sell you the tablet of your dreams.

The company created a new Kickstarter campaign to the support the launch of its new ModBook Pro X tablet which transforms any 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, into a quad-core OS X tablet so powerful you might as well toss your desktop in the trash.

Watch the full sales pitch below:

The newest beta version of iOS 8 has been seeded to developers by Apple this morning, two weeks after the release of iOS 8 beta 3.

iOS 8 beta 4 can be downloaded via an over the air update. Developers can pick also it up from the iOS Dev Center or from the direct download links posted below. We’re still downloading the update on our devices and will let you know what we new goodies we find. In the meantime, get to downloading:

Ever want to sit down with the guy at Apple who has basically been tasked to fix every disaster of the last five years? If you got more than ten grand to spare and love basketball this may be your lucky day, as CharityBuzz just opened a new auction lot that includes a one-hour paid lunch at Apple HQ with you, your friend, and Mr. Fixit Eddie Cue.

I’ve been using a USB 3 external hard drive to backup my Macbook Pro for a while now, and have been pleased with its reliability and fast data transfer speed. I also love that it powers itself via the USB port, letting me live a little more power cord free.

When I received the LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt SSD drive for review, I thought, “well, it’s pretty, but how much better can it be?” It’s just as small, powers itself via Thunderbolt (or USB) and has plenty of space on it, just like my current drive.

Then I ran a few tests and pulled up a drive speed test app on my Mac. I was blown away by the speed difference. This is one blazing fast hard drive. And, yeah, it still looks great.

We’re still crawling through the myriad of new features Apple added to the first beta of iOS 8, but now we’re about to dive back in. Apple just released iOS 8 beta 2 to developers this morning a mere 15 days after dropping the new OS on devs at WWDC.

According to the iOS 8 beta 2 release notes Apple’s mostly filled it with a ton of bug fixes, but we’ll update you on all the new features, big and small, once we’ve got it on our test devices.

Developers can pick up the new beta as an OTA update, from the iOS Dev Center or from the direct download links below:

“So here we are,” says Chris Pratt’s Starlord in the new trailer from Marvel Studios, “a thief, two thugs, an assassin, and a maniac.”

They may be an odd team, but they’re not going to stand by as evil wipes out the galaxy.

Guardians of the Galaxy is shaping up to be a fantastic take on the cult-hit comic book series, further cementing Marvel Comics as the cooler-than-you comic book movie studio with this hot new trailer, embedded below.

Although it looks like a vanilla PC in a boxy case, the machine pictured above is a high-performance, custom-built Hackintosh.

This thing is hot! Known as the P280, after its Antec case, this Hackintosh is equivalent in performance to Apple’s latest Mac Pro workstation, but costs significantly less.

Roughly comparable to a Mac Pro costing $3,500, the P280 was assembled from off-the-shelf PC parts costing just over $2,000, including a water-cooling system to chill its chips. The Hackintosh runs Apple’s OS X Mavericks and, according to its builder, bests a similarly configured Pro on many benchmarks.

It has none of Jony Ive’s industrial design magic, of course, but that’s not the point. This is a DIY rig that’s as badass as it gets.

Cult of Mac Deals has some stellar promotions lined up right now, whether you’re looking to up your storage or improve your audio recordingsby adding an external quality microphone to your workflow.

For a limited time you can get the Nifty MiniDrive, which lets you add up to 128GB of storage space to your MacBook Pro Retina for only $35.99 and a top-notch microphone in the form of the Blue Yeti can be yours for 20% off the regular price – just $117!