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Apple relies heavily on caffeine. A recent company job listing advertised a role for an iCup technician, with the important task of providing “a fresh brew coffee to all Apple employees within their department.”

Jony Ive’s design team is especially obsessed with the black stuff: For years they kept a $3,000-plus Italian Grimac espresso machine, despite the fact that it leaked all the time. For a while in the 1990s, the design team was even mockingly dubbed “Espresso” for their unabashed love of caffeine culture.

Apple’s not alone in its coffee snob behavior. The rise of coffee shops — with seemingly hundreds of variations on the old coffee standards — have infiltrated every city across the United States: Americans spend $18 billion per year on specialty coffee alone.

But how much do we actually know about it?

Apple is continuing its push to diversify its leadership with the announcement this afternoon that Susan Wagner, a wall street insider who co-found one the world’s top investment firms, has been added to the company’s board of directors, taking the spot of the board’s longest serving member.

Bill Campbell has been on Apple’s board for 17 years but has decided to retire, making room for Wagner to take her seat on Tim Cook’s board. Wagner comes to the board after co-founding BlackRock in 1988 and leading it to become one of the world’s most successful asset-management companies. She’ll continue to serve on BlackRock’s board, as well as boards for Swiss Re, Wellesley College, and Hackley School.

In an press release announcing the changes, Tim Cook had high praises for Wagner, as well as the man she’s replacing:

Apple’s new mothership isn’t expected to touchdown in Cupertino until 2016, but construction on the new campus is starting to hit a rapid pace, as new areal photos reveal the exterior walls are nearing completion as well as the construction of underground tunnels.

The Tile is a tiny plastic widget that never gets lost. In theory anyway. It talks to your iPhone via low-power Bluetooth and lets you track the Tile itself, and anything the Tile is attached to.

I’ve been using one for the last couple of weeks, and it works just fine. But so far it doesn’t seem to be much more useful than one of those keychain finders that beeps when you whistle. Why? Because to be truly useful, the Tile needs to reach a critical mass of users.

IBM and Apple’s new enterprise partnership is already being called one of the “most important and powerful tech partnerships ever.”

But outside of selling more iPads, iPhones and Macs in business, what else could Apple get out of the deal, which was announced Tuesday? According to a new report, Watson — IBM’s Jeopardy-winning A.I. capable of understanding natural language.

As the devices we likely use the most on any given day, it makes sense that our smartphones should be as personalized as possible: not necessarily in terms of the New York Knicks or Hello Kitty case we keep them in, but in terms of how much they understand us and can anticipate our behavior.

A new patent application published Thursday shows how Apple is experimenting with future iPhones and other mobile devices which can comb through the usage patterns on particular device and determine whether it is being used by its rightful owner.

For many users, the iPhone has long since been their default go-to camera, and that’s unlikely to change with the upcoming iPhone 6.

As many smartphone camera aficionados will know, Apple has been using Sony’s Exmor sensors for its cameras as far back as the iPhone 4s. Both the 4s and 5 used an Exmor IMX145 unit, while the 5s updated to a newer model.

According to a new report, the iPhone 6 is set to upgrade yet again: adopting the Sony Exmor IMX220, which boasts 13 MP and a 1/2.3″ sensor, and is capable of recording 1080p videos (3840 x 1080 resolution sampling.)

New leaked photos reportedly showing the battery from the long-awaited 4.7-inch iPhone 6 have emerged online, apparently depicting devices with a capacity of 1,810 mAh. Provided that these turn out to be genuine, this would represent a slight improvement versus the 1,560 mAh battery seen in the current generation iPhone 5s.

About a month ago, I said on Twitter that I was looking for a new podcast app to try. I’ve been a user of Instacast on iOS and OS X for a long time, but recently the app’s cloud sync has become too unreliable and glitchy.

I got a lot of suggestions, but ended up settling with Apple’s own Podcasts app. It didn’t address several things I wanted out of a podcast client, but it was the most reliable and easy to use option from what I came across.

And now, lo and behold, the most highly-anticipated new podcast app in a long time has come out. Today Marco Arment released Overcast, a simple and yet powerful podcast app for the iPhone. I’ve given it a test run, and although there is plenty of room for improvement, I’m pretty impressed.

This may be the last time you feel good about walking half a mile to get a cronut: a calorie-counting food scale and fitness tracker are on to you.

Smart food scale Prep Pad now synchs with Jawbone Up, keeping track of what you’re eating and how many calories you are burning.

It’s latest buddy system in the quantified self movement, where, as we reported earlier, your car is already conversing with your fitness tracker about how much you should be hoofing it instead of driving. Sales of fitness gadgets like the Jawbone Up, Fitbit and Nike + are over the previous year, leaving us with 19 million trackers and trainers strapped to our wrists.

Photos have surfaced on French Apple website Nowhereelse.fr that purport to show the Touch ID sensor for Apple’s next-generation iPhone 6.

While at first glance, the images look identical to the sensor embedded within the iPhone 5s — Apple’s first smartphone to feature the Touch ID technology — upon closer inspection some tiny differences in design can be spotted. These predominantly relate to the edges of the sensor where the tiny screws will attach it to the device’s metal housing.

The two sensors can be seen next to one another in the image below:

Photography is all about light, and photographers are all about light painting. There are many tricks to try, from isolating objects with incandescence outside the frame to shining light directly at the camera as in Janelle Pietrzak’s Bambi series, created using light stencils.

Creating this interesting analog photo effect doesn’t require any special equipment, just a detachable flash, some craft materials and a lot of imagination.

Splicing a cute little animal into a photograph doesn’t take more than a few seconds for anybody with a copy of Photoshop.

But Colorado artist Janelle Pietrzak spends hours cutting light stencils with a razor blade, then uses a shoebox and long-exposure photography to bring Bambi and other cuddly creatures to life inside her home.

“If you look at my photographs there is fantasy world full of mythical creatures, floating orbs, ghosts and goddesses, all created by manipulating light,” Pietrzak tells Cult of Mac. “The catch is that I hardly use any Adobe Photoshop. What you see in the images is basically what I saw on the back of my camera.”

With so many people in the world having iPhones with the same ringtones, hearing a ringer go off can be irritating and confusing. The iTunes Store sells ringtones, but they can become quite expensive if you like switching things up a lot.

In today’s video, we show you how to solve this annoying problem by creating your own free ringtones in iTunes. Just follow these simple steps to separate yourself from the crowd instantly.

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

Today Apple announced that it’s partnering with IBM to “transform enterprise mobility through a new class of business apps.” The relationship will combine IBM’s enterprise data specialties with Apple’s iOS hardware and software.

“iPhone and iPad are the best mobile devices in the world and have transformed the way people work with over 98 percent of the Fortune 500 and over 92 percent of the Global 500 using iOS devices in their business today,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook in a statement. “For the first time ever we’re putting IBM’s renowned big data analytics at iOS users’ fingertips, which opens up a large market opportunity for Apple. This is a radical step for enterprise and something that only Apple and IBM can deliver.”

There are four key areas that Apple will be working on with IBM:

We’re still waiting to get our first glimpse of Apple’s upcoming smartwatch, but according to a new report, Apple is planning to release not one, not two, but three different models of the iWatch this fall.

Citing supply chain sources in China, the Economic Daily claims Apple will make the iWatch available by the end of 2014 with three different sizes to choose from, but you’ll probably want the fatty 1.8-inch unit, as it will supposedly be the most durable of the bunch.

Apple has launched a new service called iTunes Pass in several countries, including Japan, Brazil and China.

The service lets customers buy iTunes Store credit from brick-and-mortar Apple retail stores — only using Passbook, rather than the physical gift cards most commonly used. The service appears to work by letting users add a new iTunes Pass inside the Passbook app, which they can then present at their local Apple Store. The user then states how much money they would like to turn into iTunes Store credit, and this is instantly transferred to their account.

When I was a kid, we used to label everything: toys, boxes, file folders. My parents used one of those manual rotary label dispensers, the kind you had to squeeze hard enough to make each individual letter poke up through the hard plastic label tape. It was a good day when my brother and I got to use the label maker to title our shelves, toys and books (“Rob’s Stuff” was a common theme).

These days, printing labels is a lot easier thanks to computers and label printers like the ones from Dymo and Brother. Typically, you’ve got to connect these to a Mac or PC, and then use special software to send labels to the label printer.

The Brother P-Touch P750W (printer makers really need to work on their model names) is a label printer that can connect to your computer via USB, sure, but also connect either to your existing Wi-Fi network or create its own Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n network to print labels from any device, including iPhones, iPads, Android devices, Windows PCs and Macs.

Yeah, I’ve already labeled some shelves around the house. Old habits, it appears, die hard.

iOS 8 is just around the corner and, if the iOS 7 figures are any indicator, it’s likely to find near-total adoption.

Apple just released the latest figures for its current-generation operating system, saying iOS 7 is running on a massive 90 percent of devices. iOS 6, meanwhile, stands at just 9 percent, while earlier versions of iOS represent a minuscule 2 percent combined. iOS 7 was launched 10 months ago in September 2013, making it the fastest-adopted mobile OS in history.

SAN FRANCISCO — The latest innovation of the so-called sharing economy seems perfect for this city’s hypercompetitive rental market, where tiny apartments go for outrageous sums and space is at a premium.

Sort of like Airbnb for storage, new startup Roost connects people who need to stow some stuff — furniture, boxes of books, whatever — with individuals with room to spare in an attic or garage.

The company was founded by Jon Gillon, who came up with the idea after his older brother moved here from Texas with a Subaru full of stuff.

“We improvised,” Gillon told Cult of Mac. “I made room in my apartment in exchange for drinks and dinner. When his place was ready we were like, ‘This is a great idea.’ The light bulb went on.”

The German champions may only get one World Cup trophy, but thanks to Beats Electronics, the team members will each get a complimentary pair of 24-karat gold Beats Pro headphones.

Having previously become the hit advertiser of the World Cup with its “Game Before the Game” ad (despite being banned from press events), Beats’ follow-up is a great marketing stunt. It also adds supermodel Naomi Campbell, who was photographed with the gold-dipped headphones and a similarly shiny soccer ball, to the list of high-end celebrities associated with Beats.

Besides a 4.7-inch model, Apple has been expected to announce an even larger 5.5-inch iPhone 6 this fall. But now production issues might keep Apple from pulling the trigger on an iPhablet until winter or even 2015.

Ming-Chi Kuo of the Taiwanese firm KGI Securities, who has been a consistently reliable source of information on Apple’s plans, isn’t bullish on seeing a 5.5-inch iPhone by the end of the year. Problems with the phone’s new display and casing could result in it being pushed back until well after the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 comes out.

There may not be any official announcement of Apple’s iWatch entry into the wearable tech market just yet, but that’s not stopping analysts from predicting big things for it.

The latest is Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty, who suggests that the iWatch could achieve sales in the region of 30-60 million units in its first year on the market, thanks to the “halo effect” of brand loyalty to Apple that will drive sales of the as-yet-unannounced product.

My little red-haired niece approached the casket with a single flower and placed it with the father she looks so much like.

I raised my camera to my eye and made a picture.

Though secure with my reasons for snapping the photo, I understood how taboo this could seem to others. I never made a print to pass around or display. I look at the photo now, 10 years later, and get reacquainted with grief, struck by a visceral appreciation for a chapter that continues to unfold in my family story.

That picture was a fading memory until my recent trip to the Museum of Mourning Photography and Memorial Practice in Chicago, a collection of more than 2,000 postmortem photographs and funerary ephemera.