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Secret sauce—it’s the reason Apple keeps winning where others fail, and on our newest CultCast, we discuss the recipe that keeps Apple ahead of the pack. Plus, iOS 8 rumors detail some powerful new features; whispers of an impossibly thin iPhone 6; A-list musicians praise Pono as the digital music player for audiophiles; iPad 4 makes a comeback; and we reveal our favorite Cult movies on a all-new Get To Know Your Cultist!

Guffaw your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the uproarious good time commence.

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Episode

CultCast #118 – The Secret Sauce

On The CultCast this week

Leander Kahney – Cult of Mac Editor-in-Chief, loyal subject of the Queen.
Erfon Elijah – Cult of Mac writer and host of The CultCast.
Buster Heine – Cult of Mac writer and community manager.

This Week’s Stories

iOS 8 Apple considers Notification Center Messages tweaks removing Game Center app (Discussion)

Pegatron And Foxconn Gearing Up For iPhone 6 Production [Rumor]

Apple Retires iPad 2, Replaces It With Retina Display Model

Apple Confirms The 8GB iPhone 5c Will Not Be Sold In The U.S.

Tim Cook Says ‘Haunted Empire’ Book Is A Bunch Of Nonsense

Apple has been talking to record label executives about launching its own on-demand streaming service, according to a new report from Billboard. In what would certainly be a shocking turn of events, Apple is allegedly considering an iTunes app for Android as well.

“The surprising discussions are part of a multi-pronged strategy to deal with the double-digit decline in U.S. download sales at Apple’s iTunes Music Store,” according to the report.

SAN FRANCISCO — We’re gearing up for our weeklong foray into the world of video games at the Game Developers Conference here. Cult of Mac will bring you the best of the conference, from heartfelt chats with independent developers to wacky schwag we find on the expo floor.

Stay tuned as we add real-time posts to this liveblog all week.

While many have developed puzzle video-games, not many have compared to the popularity of the hit game “Tetris”. Symbol Link is a new puzzle app created by Alexey Pajitnov, the mind behind Tetris, that has players connect symbols in the least amount of paths. Do you think you can link all symbols and get a high-score?

Take a look at Symbol Link and find out what you think.

This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the iOS application Symbol Link brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”

In a world where Apple’s far and away the most valuable brand in existence, it’s easy to forget that once upon the time it was “the little guy.”

Which is why it’s nice to see Apple highlighting indie game developers in a new section of the App Store called “Indie Game Showcase.”

The section looks set to highlight different indie developers on a regular basis — both shining some much-neeeded light on particular titles, and also offering behind-the-curtain looks at particular indie studios.

Medium, the publishing platform from Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, has finally released its official iPhone app. As you would expect from a site that prides itself on clean, minimalistic aesthetics, the app is quite nice.

It is also incredibly limited.

There are no editing or posting options for actually sharing content on Medium. The app is solely for reading, at least for now.

Amazon has been rumored for years to be making its own smartphone, but now, according to reputable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, it’s actually going to happen.

But the weirdest thing isn’t that Amazon’s planning on releasing a smartphone… it’s that they are going to release a smartphone with six cameras per unit. What what?

When Jony Ive ripped Scott Forstall’s spine out (metaphorically speaking) and took over as the design head of iOS, he got rid of many gradients, shadows, and other elements that made the app look, at worst, skeuomorphic.

Sadly, though, Ive hasn’t had a chance yet to take the same approach to OS X. But everyone’s expecting OS X 10.10 to flatten OS X out, and Dribbble designer Danny Giebe has a gorgeous look at what the next version of Mac OS X — which he codenames ‘Syrah’ — would look like if Ive extended iOS’s design to the Mac.

Check the full redesign out after the jump. What do you think?

Puzzles have been stumping people for quite some time. From jigsaw puzzles to the Rubik’s cube, people everywhere have been trying to tackle their fun challenges. The app Unroll Me features lots of levels at different difficulties having players help guide a white ball to its goal. Can you slide every piece correctly and quickly enough to get a high-score?

Take a look at Unroll Me and find out what you think.

This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the multi-platform application Unroll Me brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”

Few CEOs can hold a candle to the wrath and fury of Steve Jobs, but when it comes to epic rants, Christian Bale can certainly hold his own against el Jobso, which might make him the perfect person to play Steve in the Aaron Sorkin written film from Sony.

Director David Finch is keen on getting the Dark Knight into Steve’s black turtleneck, according to a report from The Wrap, which says the director has pegged Bale as his top choice to play Steve Jobs.

It’s that time of year when office work comes to a stand still for weeks thanks to the NCAA’s annual celebration of sweat, leather, and nylon nets. The first games have just gotten underway and thanks to the glorious blessings of technology there are more ways to follow the March Madness action than ever before.

Here’s how to keep track of your favorite teams and your brackets on your iPhone, iPad and Mac:

Employees at the Minneapolis-based FirstTech store — the world’s first Apple reseller — learned on Wednesday that the store will be closing down at the end of March, after 73 years in business.

“I had no idea it would happen this soon,” onetime FirstTech worker Tom Schmidt tweeted. “But I honestly thought it was inevitable.”

BlackBerry CEO John Chen recently dismissed iPhone users as “wall huggers” due to his suggestion that they constantly have to hug walls looking for electricity sockets to stop their phones running out of battery midday.

Two patents published Thursday show that Apple is not taking similar criticism lying down, as it actively investigating the possibility of intelligently discerning when, where and how we use our iOS devices — and utilizing this information to tweak performance to prolong battery life.

Venus — the 256-foot super-yacht, commissioned by Steve Jobs — has been sighted in Mexico’s Cabo San Lucas bay.

Despite telling journalist John Markoff in 1980 that, “There’s no yacht in my future,” Jobs began working on building his dream sailing vessel around 2008 prior to his liver transplant. Jobs commissioned legendary French designer Philippe Starck to design the yacht, which cost more than €100 million to build, although Jobs died before he was able to use it.

Last month, Sir Lancelot’s Armor, a maker of screen protectors for smartphones, emailed Ars Technica and asked them if they would review the “first reusable screen protector for iPhones and iPads made out of bulletproof glass.”

So how bulletproof was their screen protector? Ars Technica put it to the test the only way they knew how… by firing a full clip from a Beretta into it at the range. Here’s how it did.

Recently Cult of Mac described how among Siri’s Easter eggs is a whole back story — programmed by her creators, and accessible by asking just the right questions.

Beginning life as a five-year DARPA-backed project to build an intelligent virtual assistant, Siri certainly has some stories to tell: if only we could gain access to them.

When I wrote my story a couple of weeks ago, I asked readers to send in any insights they managed to unlock. Dallas-based tech columnist and CoM reader Jim Rossman read the article and sent in some interesting screenshots from his own conversations with Siri — revealing some insights that go beyond her usual “I was designed by Apple in California” spiel.

Are you a Mac collector? An Apple investor? Do you like to buy old computers still new in their original packaging? If so, do we have a storage locker for you!

Marion Stokes was a librarian, activist and local access television producer from Philadelphia. Recently she made news for her incredible archive of 35 years of TV news broadcasts, recorded continuously on home videotapes from 1977 until her death in 2012. But Stokes was also a longtime Apple investor and Macintosh fan. Over the same timeframe she acquired nearly two hundred new-in-box Macintosh computers and related Apple gear, and kept much of this equipment sealed for posterity.

It’s another incredible history, about technology and one unique Silicon Valley tech entity. And it can be yours, if the price is right. The whole kit and caboodle is available on eBay, listed for the Buy It Now price of $100,000!

Apple’s brand value is more than the total cost of the Apollo Space Program in today’s dollars, according to a new report by brand consulting agency Brand Finance.

Apple topped a list of 500 firms — including heavyweights like Walmart, Google, and AT&T — to be named the most valuable billion-dollar U.S. brand name.

Brand Finance compiled the list by estimating the royalty rate that would be charged to use a company’s brand, taking into account current and expected future revenue. Notably Apple was the only brand to have surpassed the $100 billion mark, being valued at $104.7 billion.

We’ve seen Martin Hajek’s incredible Apple TV concept with a touchscreen remote before, but in an update to the project, Hajek has imagined what the Apple TV would be like if the next gen set-top box didn’t ship with just a touchscreen controller, but a traditional gamepad as well.

I’ll say this for Hajek’s Apple TV gamepad: it looks like a controller Jony Ive would design. Thin, sleek, classic, beautiful, and utterly unsuited for actual gaming.

What do you think? Additional images after the jump.

If you spend a lot of time on the App Store, you’ve probably wondered if app icons are colored the way they are for a reason. Are certain shades more likely to correspond to certain app types than others? And what are the most over- and under-represented Pantone swatches in the App Store pallette?

If these are the sort of questions you have ever asked yourself, you’ll probably enjoy this great infographic by Brandisty, who crawled the iOS App Store, grabbed the top 5 app icons from each category, and then ran a hisogram analysis to find out which colors were used most often.

I wish they’d polled more apps, but this is great. Business apps are just as blue and boring as I thought they were! Check out the complete infographic after the jump.

We’ve seen a lot of iPhone 6 concepts lately.

Here’s another one, in a dramatic mock advertisement that uses a much more dramatic electronic score than the poppier serenades usually favored by Cupertino. Check out the video below!

When playing games on your devices it’s common for the most challenging to be the most played. The game Bouncing Slime: Impossible Levels is an arcade game that boasts incredibly challenging levels. Simply tap to help the ball of slime surpass dangerous platforms and enemies to reach a checkered flag. Do you think you can pass every level?

Take a look at Bouncing Slime: Impossible Levels and find out what you think.

This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the iOS application Bouncing Slime: Impossible Levels brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”

In the time it took you to type the words “Cult of Mac” into your web browser and read up to here in this article, Apple made approximately $162,585.

That’s the amount the Cupertino company earns every 30 seconds according to a new data visualization created on behalf of WorldPay Zinc — showing just how much revenue and profit Apple and its fellow tech giants make on a rolling basis.

Writing a book about any technology company is hard. Books take a long time to write, and a longer time to make it into print and arrive in stores. Technology, on the other hand, moves quickly. As a tech author, you have two options. One is to write a book that tries its best to be timely by making it to market as soon as possible. The other is to wait until a book-length narrative has unfolded, and then to write about it. Tech writers, I suggest, would typically prefer the latter. Book publishers prefer the former.

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who would argue that Apple’s Lightning connector isn’t superior to the old 30-pin connector in every way. That’s why it’s surprising that it has taken Apple so long to phase 30-pin out of its product lineup.

Today Apple brought back the fourth-gen iPad to replace the non-Retina iPad 2. While the press release focuses on the obvious display upgrade, discontinuing the iPad 2 means something else that’s important: another nail in the coffin for 30-pin.