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When it comes to Black Friday shopping online, no one does it bigger than Amazon. Starting today, Amazon’s Black Friday hub will be featuring new deals literally every 10 minutes, which is probably too much for the feeble human brain to handle.

There will be limited-time Lightning Deals, Deals of the Day, and a slew of discounts for everything from 4K TVs to Rubik’s cubes. And of course Amazon Prime customers will be treated like royalty with free shipping and the ability to get deals before everyone else.

Amazon will roll out a new, standalone video streaming service next year that won’t be bundled with a $99 Prime subscription, according to sources familiar with its plans. The retail giant hopes to take on rivals like Netflix and Hulu and undercut their prices in an effort to attract customers.

Back in May, Apple’s iPad regained its illustrious titles as the top tablet according to the J.D. Power’s U.S. Tablet Satisfaction survey.

Fast forward five months, and Apple’s lost the title… to Amazon, of all companies. Is this even real life?

Amazon added Apple Pay support today for its Amazon.com Rewards Visa.

Since Chase, the Amazon rewards card issuer, was an Apple Pay launch partner, some speculated that Amazon intentionally opted out of Apple’s mobile payments system. But Amazon quickly confirmed this week that it was working on adding support for its credit card in the near future. Now it’s followed through.

During its earnings call yesterday Amazon gave some clues about just how spectacularly its Fire Phone business is tanking — making it seem one of the worst tech ideas since the RMS Titanic shipped without lifeboats.

How bad are we talking? At the end of its disappointing third-quarter the company still has a massive $83 million worth of unsold inventory sitting around.

It’s now taking a $170 million charge “primarily related to Fire phone inventory valuation and supplier commitment costs.”

Nobody would ever call Amazon’s Fire Phone a hit, but even the company’s most loyal shoppers are apparently avoiding the phone like the plague.

A new report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners says that while the Amazon Prime subscription service continues to attract new members, the Fire Phone “has achieved virtually zero market share.”

Is Apple vs. Amazon the next “thermonuclear” tech war?

Perhaps not quite yet, but with Amazon moving into smartphones, and Apple choosing to stock the books Amazon refuses to, competition is certainly heating up. That may go some way toward explaining Apple’s acquisition of BookLamp, a startup described as the “Pandora for books,” which offers personalized book recommendations.

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.

Today Amazon took the wraps off its Kindle Unlimited subscription, an all-you-can-read plan that was uncovered earlier this week. For $9.99 per month you get access to 600,000 Kindle titles, including “thousands” of audiobooks from Audible.

Everything is available though Amazon’s Kindle apps, including iOS and the Mac.

Long-time rivals Apple and IBM partnered up this week to work together on enterprise software, but what does this mean for Siri? If Apple’s trusty voice assistant gets together with IBM’s extremely intelligent A.I. Watson, it could be a beautiful “relationship.”

Watch today’s Cult of Mac news roundup to hear all the latest news and rumors about this potential Apple-IBM hookup, possible trouble in the iPhone 6 sapphire glass pipeline, a toaster that burns your selfies into bread and the rest of the week’s biggest stories.

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

Apple and Google may reign supreme as the top two tech companies in the U.S., but when it comes to attractiveness, Amazon and Microsoft employees are absolutely slaying them.

After crunching the numbers from its social-networking app for professionals, Hinge found that employees from Amazon are the most sought-after on network, topping both Google, Facebook and Microsoft, with Apple’s young professionals coming in dead last.

There’s a fire in the Amazon! I’m so sorry. Bad jokes aside, on this week’s CultCast we’ll tell you what we love and don’t about Amazon’s much-buzzed debut mobile phone. Plus: the iMac just got a lot cheaper… and slower; another Weibo leak reportedly shows a huge 5.5-inch iPhone 6; the cool additions to iOS 8 and Yosemite’s 2nd betas; this summer’s hottest mens’ bathing suit attire; plus, you asked, we answer—it’s an all-new CultCast Q&A!

Our thanks to TextExpander for supporting this episode! TextExpander for Mac saves you time and effort by expanding short abbreviations into frequently-used text, pictures, code blocks, and more, and it’s an application we use every single day. Try it out for free at Smilesoftware.com/cultcast.

Click on for the show notes.

After years of work on its first mobile phone, Amazon has finally revealed the Fire Phone. Boasting an extensive recognition system known as Firefly and 3-D features powered by something called Dynamic Perspective, the device is now available for pre-order.

In today’s video we give you an overview of the flashy new device, which was unveiled Wednesday by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and compare Fire Phone to Apple’s mobile offerings (both the current iPhone 5s and the upcoming iPhone 6).

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

While Amazon’s locked in an ongoing dispute with publishing house Hachette — which has resulted in the publisher’s books being pulled from Amazon’s shelves — Apple’s more than happy to take advantage of the situation.

Apple’s iTunes store is currently promoting a sale on digital versions of popular Hachette titles, which includes upcoming books from the likes of James Patterson and J.K. Rowling.

I just switched from Kindle to Kobo. Why? Amazon. It’s currently extorting publishing house Hachette by delaying orders and refusing to allow pre-orders for certain titles. The exact machinations are secret, but many people agree that Amazon is demanding discounts on ebooks.

I don’t want to see authors forced to get a second job to survive, so I switched. No more Kindle ebooks. I switched to Kobo, which has a great e-ink reader, a deep book catalog, and – most importantly – breakable DRM.

The results are mixed, with ups and downs for both the service and the hardware.

Rumors of an Amazon smartphone have been circulating for a long time, but now it looks like the device will finally be shown to the world this month.

Amazon has announced a launch event for a “new device” on June 18th, and it’s probably a phone. Some kind of fancy 3D technology is rumored to be its main selling point, and Amazon has a teaser video that strongly suggest that will be the case.

The album is dead. So dead Amazon thinks customers won’t even care if all the songs in its new music-streaming service have been spun out of tune by DJs across the country for months.

To boost its digital offerings, Amazon is planning to launch its own music service, reports BuzzFeed, but rather than stocking up on the latest hit songs, Prime Music will shun new releases in favor of a potluck offering of songs and albums that are at least six months old.

So far, we at Cult of Mac have not been big fans of Amazon’s acquisition of ComiXology. Although we’ve previously praised them as the iTunes of comic books, the first thing the e-shopping giant did upon purchasing Comixology was stop allowing you to purchase comics directly within the app on iOS, presumably to get around paying Apple its 30% cut.

It was an anti-consumer move that made the app infinitely less appealing for digital comic readers, but Amazon has now announced something that might take some of the sting out: they’re releasing a free comic a day for the next three weeks. That means 19 free comics, which should be enough to tempt anyone who lovers comics to at least download the app.

Still stumped what to get your dad for Father’s Day? Apple’s hoping you’ll go big and gift him an iPad Air, but even if you just want to get a sweet iPhone case for the old man the online Apple Store will now ship it to you at no extra cost.

There are few companies you can trust with your private data ever since the revelations leaked by Edward Snowden shook the tech world last year, but according to the latest report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, our iPhone-making friends in Cupertino have gone from being a privacy chump to the people’s champ in just a year.

When it comes to getting sued over U.S. patent infringements, no one gets targeted more than Apple.

A new study from legal analytics firm Lex Machina found that in 2013 Apple was the most frequent target of patent lawsuits, followed by Amazon at No. 2, as both companies came under heavy fire from a group of 10 “patent monetization entities” that were responsible for a staggering 13 percent of the 6,092 patent-infringement suits filed last year.

Here’s a breakdown of the top 10 most-sued companies:

Apple is making it quicker than ever to return unwanted iPhones and other gadgets purchased online with a new policy that gives customers refunds twice as fast.

In an effort to boost direct sales from its website, Apple has decided to take a big upfront cost on returns, according to Reuters, but the small move could give it the boost it needs to compete with Amazon and Best Buy online.

As good as the experience of shopping in a physical Apple Store undoubtedly is, Apple’s also making major leaps in its online sales business.

According to new data released by e-commerce research firm Internet Retailer, Apple had a great 2013: not only overtaking Staples to become the No. 2 online retailer, but actually growing faster than Amazon.

What Amazon taketh away, Amazon also giveth.

One week after enraging comic nerds everywhere by removing the option to purchase titles within its ComiXology iOS app, Amazon has made it easier than ever purchase products thanks to a snazzy new Twitter feature.

From this point on  — provided you live in either the U.S. or UK — whenever a customer discovers a tweet from their favorite artist, brand, friend, etc. featuring an Amazon product link, they can simply add “#AmazonCart” to their reply and that product is added to their Amazon.com Shopping Cart. (UK customers must add #AmazonBasket instead.)

ComiXology has long been one of my favorite iOS apps, but I’m not a big fan of the latest update, which makes it impossible to purchase comics from within the app.

For the longest time, ComiXology was the easiest and best way to buy comics on a mobile device. Now the app has become solely a comic book reader: You must visit ComiXology’s website to buy new issues. You can still browse comics in the app, and download free ones, but the actual payment part must be done elsewhere.

Why has ComiXology gone all supervillain on us?