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Tim Cook has led Apple into the front of the LGBT-rights movement with company appearances at Gay Pride parades and Wall Street Journal op-eds demanding equal rights for gay workers, but according to one Apple Store customer in Portland, some of Cook’s employee don’t share his enthusiasm for inclusion.

Adam Catanzarite, who self-identifies as queer, has taken to social media after an Apple specialist printed off his receipt for a set of EarPods with a not-so-subtle homophobic slur tossed in the spot reserved for his email addresses.

Take a look:

The idea that the forthcoming iPhone 6 (expected to be unveiled September 9) is the most anticipated refresh of Apple’s smartphone in ages was given further credibility by a recent survey by financial firm R.W. Baird.

Quizzing 1,000 residents surveyed in July, 6.8 percent of respondees said that they planned to buy the iPhone 6 without ever having laid eyes on it. This number is up from the 4.4 percent who answered that same way back in February.

The firm also notes that this intent to purchase is higher than the number of people who said they would buy the iPhone 5s after it had already been announced.

Apple has a long history of keeping BitTorrent apps out of the App Store. If you search for “BitTorrent” in the App Store now, only two results show up. Neither of them allow you to actually download torrents.

That’s why it was surprising when an app called Blue Downloader showed up in the store a couple of days ago. Its secret sauce is that it allows users to find and download torrents through sources chosen by its developer, Tyler Harrison, making it hard to use for illegal downloads like grabbing Expendables 3 off The Pirate Bay.

Apple approved Blue Downloader, but after Harrison made a change that allowed searching Google for torrents, the app was suddenly pulled. In an interview with Cult of Mac, Harrison explains how Apple’s response reflects its “innate fear of BitTorent” and his plans to get his app back in the store.

The tragic news of Robin Williams’ sudden death has sent most of us on a YouTube binge, watching TV shows, movies, and stand-up comedy bits from the funniest man who ever lived, and now Apple is paying its respects to the late-comedian with a new iTunes section dedicated to the world’s favorite cross-dressing funny man.

Apple has released its first ever report on the diversity of its workforce today, revealing what we’ve all known for year: it’s mostly a bunch of white dudes.

Diversity is still a work in progress at Apple, but the company says its report does show some progress as currently 70% of its global workforce are men.

How valuable is it to have an Apple Store in your property portfolio? Pretty valuable indeed, as it (unsurprisingly) turns out.

That’s the point proven by the Third Street Promenade Apple Store in Southern California, which has just sold to new real estate buyers for a record-breaking $100 million: making it the per-square-foot record holder for commercial real estate in the entire West Los Angeles area.

According to new reports, Apple has been meeting with major health providers to discuss its new HealthKit service, set to debut with iOS 8.

Apple has supposedly meet with healthcare officials at Mount Sinai, the Cleveland Clinic and Johns Hopkins, alongside Allscripts, which is a competitor to major electronic health records provider Epic Systems.

The talks concern how Apple wants to make the health data it plans to help collect (including blood pressure, pulse rate, weight, etc.) available to both consumers and health providers.

Apple hopes that physicians will be able to use this data (provided permission is granted) to monitor patients in between hospital visits, in order to make better decisions concerning diagnostics and treatment.

Martin Hajek usually puts his considerable 3-D rendering skills to the task of creating conceptual models of Apple’s upcoming hardware. But after producing his highly-accurate rendering of the iPhone 6 last week, the Dutch artist has tried his hand at something a bit different: imagining a new kind of retail packaging for Apple’s next smartphone, as well as what the iPhone 6 will look like when it’s on display at your local Apple Store.

Tim Cook has tweeted his condolences in the wake of the tragic death of actor and stand-up comedian Robin Williams, at age 63.

Cook wrote that he is “Heartbroken by the news of Robin Williams’ passing. He was an incomparable talent and a great human being. Rest in peace.”

The successor to the iPad Air will feature a new anti-reflection coating designed to make reading easier, according to a report today from Bloomberg.

Apple has reportedly begun the production process for the next-gen 9.7-inch iPad and smaller iPad mini. As expected, both are on track to debut before the holidays.

iPad sales have been declining, and without some other whiz-bang new features, it’s difficult to imagine what will make new iPads interesting this fall.

Summer reading tends to lean towards the frothy or the ambitious. It looks like Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is definitely in the ambitious camp.

His summer reads, as shown on his desk, include a work by an economist about innovation, a tome on the power of the labor force, and, oh yeah, Leander Kahney’s Jony Ive The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products.

We’ve already seen two new iPhone part leaks out coming out of China this morning, but to complete today’s hat trick a new set of images show that Apple could be looking to make some serious improvements to the iPhone’s True Tone flash module.

Several new iPhone 6 parts have been leaked according to Nowhereelse.fr, among which is an alleged iPhone 6 flex cable that shows Apple has created a round True Tone flash module.

Aside from the larger phablet-sized display, one of the most visually obvious changes we’d heard about for the iPhone 6 was the possibility that the cutout Apple logo on its rear would enable LED-powered user notifications, or MacBook-style illumination.

Well, that may not be happening after all, according to newly leaked images from Taiwanese Apple blog AppleClub. The website has posted what appears to be a stack of Apple logos, ready to be fitted to the back panel of the next generation iPhone, featuring nothing in the way of LEDs or connectors.

The person who posted the image also confirms that the logo is not planned to emit light as previously speculated about.

Apple’s beloved co-founder Steve Wozniak turns 64 years old today. Steve Jobs may be the most admired figure to come out of Apple, but with his imperious distance from us mere mortals, he was hard to love.

Wozniak, on the other hand, is well and truly beloved by the tech community.

A true Silicon Valley original, he’s the genius who invented the personal computer, got rich, and then spent his fortune having fun rather than taking over the world. It doesn’t hurt that he’s also a practical joker, all-around nerd, and someone who has never been afraid to speak his mind about technology’s power to change the world.

Want to improve your Monday by seeing how design guru Jony Ive lives? Over the weekend, Business Insider ran a gallery, showcasing Apple’s acclaimed design guru’s home on San Francisco’s “Gold Coast,” also known as “Billionaire’s Row.”

Another day, another apparent leak of the forthcoming iPhone 6, expected to be unveiled by Apple on September 9.

The photos appeared on the Taiwanese website AppleClub, and look to show the exterior and interior of the 4.7-inch iPhone’s front panel.

Although they don’t offer us anything revelatory that we’ve not seen before in grainy leaked-photo detail, they do does further give us one of the clearest looks yet at some of the changes we’re expecting to see with the next generation Apple handset: namely a larger display and rounded edges.

How will the culture Steve Jobs cultivated at Apple continue to live on after his death? That was the main question being asked when Jobs lost the battle to cancer in 2011.

Part of the answer is a program Jobs put together around the time of the original iPhone launch. Apple University, which works almost exactly like you would imagine, teaches employees about the company’s history and ethos. Real class names include “Communicating at Apple,” “What Makes Apple, Apple,” and “The Best Things.”

In the most in-depth look at the educational program to date, The New York Times sheds light on the kinds of classes Ivy League professors teach about everything from designing like Picasso to choosing which buttons go on a TV remote.

As the eighth of the planned ten episodes in this final season of HBO vamp-drama, True Blood, “Almost Home” brings more storylines to a close, weaning us off the Bon Temps drama gently, with a few fun explodey bits along the way.

Eric and Pam get the lowdown on Mr. Gus’ final solution to the Nu Blood plan to total market domination, while Hoyt, Jason and Jessica start to clean up their complications. The missing kids and jealous vampire story comes to an abrupt yet satisfying end, and Sookie does all she can to help find a cure for her true love, Vampire Bill.

Be warned! Spoilers abound below, but as this is another talky episode, for the most part, we’re going to keep it short and to the point.

Halt and Catch Fire isn’t Silicon Valley where the presence of a woman in a skirt sends the coders into a tailspin. This is the dying cry of the zipless f**k, before everyone got spooked about AIDS. This is hot neon, the smell of the soldering gun on a circuit board, and the deep empty place inside that drives creative people to do crazy things, think different, and meet each other where the metal meets the code.

Unfortunately, dismal ratings may possibly keep the show, whose plot hinges on a rag-tag group of misfits reverse engineering the IBM PC around the same time Woz & Jobs were busy home-brewing in the garage, from being picked up for a second season.

You can watch Halt and Catch Fire, named for the machine code (HCF) that was able to cause a computer to stop working, on AMC or iTunes.

We feel so strongly about this retro-tastic show (Coleco! Pong! Texas Instruments!) that we put up a petition to save it. Here’s why you should sign:

The iPhone 6 seems to get nearer and nearer each week as Apple fanboys and other tech enthusiasts await an official reveal date with mounting anxiety, but the age of the iPhone 6 might finally be close at hand. A year’s worth of leaks, rumors, and theories regarding the iPhone 6 are finally about to be put to rest, thanks to sources who revealed this week exactly when we can expect Apple to reveal their next generation iPhone.

Watch today’s Cult of Mac news roundup for all the details on the rumored iPhone 6 keynote date, as well as iOS 8 beta 5 details, and even why one piece of technology has Kanye West filing lawsuits like his name’s Johnnie Cochran.

Of course, don’t forget to subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube and catch all our latest videos.

Everyone wants to make a mint in the App Store. But while some developers slave away in coding dens on original ideas, others see a get-rich-quick shortcut through copying.

The result is an App Store littered with clones, frustrated devs, and Apple stuck playing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole to police the rip-off apps.

Recently the developers of micro-messaging service Yo — this year’s most unlikely App Store success story — were shocked to discover that another eerily-similar app called Yolo was hoovering up its potential downloads.

“I noticed a clone that was an exact replica, including the exact same UI, same App Store screenshots, and same App Store description copied word-for-word,” Yo creator Or Arbel tells Cult of Mac.

An exhibit full of tortoises with iPads glued to their shells. Is this the next evolutionary stage of the family testudinidae? Hardly. It’s an art exhibit in Colorado’s Aspen Art Museum that has animal activists hopping mad.