2013 was an enormous year for Apple.  Yes, there were hyped keynotes galore, fabulous new products, record breaking sales, and much, much more. But 2013 was about more than just hardware for Apple Inc. During Tim Cook’s second full-year reigning over Apple we saw the CEO really settle into his role helming the largest tech company in the world while Jony Ive’s influence grew to greater heights than in the Jobs-era as he spread his design tentacles from hardware to software.

Jony and Tim weren’t the only stars of 2013 though. There was the up-and-coming VP of software engineering Craig Federighi and Craig Federighi’s Hair, while Apple’s hiring of Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts received heaps of praise from both the financial, tech, and fashion markets. Oh and don’t forget about goons like David Einhorn, Carl Icahn and even cranky old John McCain getting their jabs in at Apple throughout the year.

Here’s Cult of Mac’s look back on Apple in the year 2013:

There was a time when one of the few parts of your Mac that you could upgrade was the CPU, but recently, Apple has phased out CPU upgradeability in favor of slimmer form factors with soldered-in silicon chips.

One surprising exception to Apple’s stance against user upgradeability, however, is the 2013 Mac Pro, which is now confirmed to have a processor that can be upgraded by the user.

When Apple announced a completely redesigned Mac Pro this past summer, the biggest question mark was the price tag. As a company that’s known for selling quality hardware at a premium, would Apple price the Mac Pro ultra-competitively or stick to its infamous ‘Apple tax’?

Well, the most expensive Mac Pro you can buy costs nearly 10K by itself. For normal people, that’s a hard price to swallow. But with two base configurations and plenty of build-to-order options, the real pros have no trouble dropping cash on Apple’s new powerhouse.

Here’s what a maxed out Mac Pro looks like:

There are tons of solutions to get iOS photos from your device to some sort of backup system, from Dropbox to iPhoto. Backing up your photos is imperative, especially on iOS, as the iCloud backup system doesn’t back up photos, and PhotoStream only keeps the last 1,000 photos on your phone synced to all your enabled devices.

Backing up to cloud services is extremely convenient, but what happens when you no longer want to pay for the storage, or would rather hang on to your digital memories on your own computer? Sure, you can connect to your Mac with a cable, but then you’ve got to do the hard work of figuring out which photos you’ve already backed up.

Sync Photos To Storage, a new app from developer Simplex Solutions, aims to make this process much, much easier.

Great news for Lightroom users who both own iPads and love the Java runtime: The Mosaic app can now do two-way sync with Lightroom on your Mac, letting you load photos onto your computer and then sit down in your favorite easy chair with a cup of coffee to rate and reject your pictures using the iPad.

Apple has just seeded the first beta for iOS 7.1. Registered developers can grab the update from the Developer Center. The beta release comes just four days after Apple published iOS 7.0.4 to the public that included a fix for failed FaceTime calls.

We’re still waiting for more info on the new goodies, but we’ll update you on new features once we’ve got it downloaded.

According to the release notes iOS 7 beta 1 includes a number of performance enhancements and bug fixes.

Here are some of the new things we’ve found so far:

Imagine Dropbox. That was easy, right? Now imagine that instead of having all your files stored on some NSA-bait server somewhere on the internet, those files are instead stored on a hard drive of your own. And yet they’re still as readily accessible from all your devices via the internet.

That was, admittedly, a little trickier to imagine. But it was worth it, because our collective thinking has somehow magicked the new Transporter Sync into existence.

Last week, we reported that cutesy-wutesy-fuzzy-wuzzy-wumpus-bear (and Apple co-founder) Steve Wozniak was unimpressed with the new iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina Display. His supposed complaint? 128GB just wasn’t enough for a man with a huge media collection like him!

It seemed uncharacteristic for Woz to publicly bash the company he helped create. Woz is an innocent, and usually reacts to every new Apple product with wide-eyed glee, so his complaints seemed strange. For good reason, too, because Woz says he was misquoted, and actually likes the new iPads just fine.

After announcing new MacBook Pros, Apple’s Phil Schiller turned everyone’s attention to the Mac Pro. The all-new Pro was originally teased at WWDC in June, and today Schiller called it Apple’s “vision of the future of the pro desktop.” Schiller also revealed that the Mac Pro will be assembled entirely in the U.S, as was previously rumored.

After months of waiting, Schiller finally unveiled the machine’s base price: a hefty $2999. An exact release date has still not been announced, but Apple says it will be available for purchase before the “end of the year.”

You’d have a hard time forcing me to remove the fantastic Gemini duplicate removal tool from my Macs, but that’s not to say I don’t like to have a little fling now and then (in fact, I regularly two-time Gemini with Daisy Disk, another great app for seeing what’s taking up space on your hard drive or SSD). And that fling might just be with Intego’s WashingMachine 2014, another duplicate finder app which adds in some distinctly different features.