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For years, home automation has been the exclusive province of the very rich or extremely technical.

Companies you’ve probably never heard of, such as AMX, Control4, Crestron, Elan, HomeLogic, Colorado vNet, Vantage and Zenpanion have provided the platforms and many of the fundamental products, while integrators took care of the installation and service for many people.

Or, very dedicated and technical DIY enthusiasts have cobbled together their own ingenious solutions.

Recently, the major phone carriers have gotten into the act, and rumors suggest Google, Apple, Microsoft and other consumer electronics companies are working on home automation.

The reason everybody’s jumping is that home automation is in the process of making a transition from “hardly anybody” to “pretty much everybody.” So everybody wants a piece of what will definitely be a massive new industry.

In five years, the majority of homes in the United States are likely to have significant home automation happening in their homes — voice-controlled thermostats, Bluetooth-unlocking door locks, lights on self-learning timers, automated pet feeders, doorbells that ring your phone rather than a bell in the house and much more.

The reason? Kickstarter, mostly.

This week Cult of Mac Magazine  gets serious about games with an issue dedicated to one of our favorite pastimes.

We’ve never bought into the idea that video games turn your brain to mush (sorry mom!) and this issue explores the games that are doing good — the growing market for empathy games that strive to make us all better people. (The retro-tastic cover is the handiwork of Craig Grannell, the designing force behind the magazine.)

We also look at games that are engaging enough to convince the non-gamers you know to take up the controller, what to play when you’re sick of the blockbusters and our Games Editor Rob LeFebvre tells you how to get your game on our radar for a review.

The latest issue is available in the App Store. Let the games begin!

Apple’s new, multi-billion dollar campus has been in the works since Steve Jobs proposed the project to the city of Cupertino back in the summer of 2011. Construction on the 175-acre site, dubbed “Apple Campus 2.0,” is projected to begin by 2015-2016. The plan for the project will get the final vote of approval from the Cupertino City Council on October 15th.

We’ve seen mockups of what the UFO-like campus will look like already, but now Apple’s incredibly detailed model replica of the campus has been published online.

Robots are pretty cool, but have you ever wanted to create your own iPhone controlled cyborg? Backyard Brains is banking that a lot of kids are interested in cyborg technology and neuroscience (ethical dilemmas be damned), so after three years of R&D they’ve come up with the RoboRoach – a small electronic surgery kit that lets you turn a real-life cockroach, into an iPhone-controlled cyborg for a few minutes.

The kit comes with a backpack that contains a battery and receiver you superglue to the cockroach after sanding down a patch of shell.  You have to jab a groundwire into the cockroaches thorax, and then after that you carefully trim the antenna so you can stick some small electrodes onto both of them and receive signals from your iPhone. Don’t worry, the iPhone app and the cockroaches come free with the $99 kit, so you don’t have to go hunting for some behind your supermarket’s dumpster.

Thanks to the iPhone, it seems there’s little hope left for BlackBerry these days. Apple has stolen most of its market share, and now it’s stealing its employees, too. The Cupertino company has reportedly been contacting BlackBerry staff via LinkedIn and inviting them to recruitment events in Cambridge, Ontario.

Your swanky new iPhone 5s may be significantly faster than its predecessors, but it’s twice as likely to crash when running third-party apps as the iPhone 5 and the iPhone 5c. New research from Crittercism, a company that monitors mobile app performance, has found that apps crash around 2% on the iPhone 5s, but under 1% on its siblings.

Still haven’t been able to get your hands on the iPhone 5s model you want? If you didn’t wait in line on launch day or order online already, chances are you’re going to have trouble finding any 5s for awhile, much less your desired color and capacity.

The same guy who created this handy website for checking 5s stock at nearby Apple Stores has a new service that will email you an alert the moment the iPhone 5s you want is available at your local Apple Store. Eureka!

A couple days ago we showed you a custom Leica camera designed by none other than Jony Ive. The camera will be auctioned to raise money for Bono’s Product (Red), a campaign Apple has partnered with for years to fight the spreading of H.I.V. in Africa (if you’ve ever bought a red iPod, you’ve helped contribute).

Ive and legendary designer Marc Newson have created their own designs of over 40 products for the auction, including a Steinway grand piano. The two men also designed a desk from scratch that looks like an extension of the iMac.

Ive and Newson recently sat down with Vanity Fair for an extensive interview about designing for the Product (Red) charity auction, and as you can imagine, it’s a great read.

This story first appeared in our weekly newsstand publication Cult of Mac Magazine. 

Long before Apple’s “Think Different,” ad campaign, before the dot-com boom, before zany became the norm in startup culture, there was Nolan Bushnell, Pong and Atari – the company where Steve Jobs landed his first job.

Bushnell is the godfather of the think different mentality, an unconventional character who ran unconventional companies. He made it a personal mission to attract similarly creative, passionate people to help him to realize some of his ideas, which many people considered wacky at the time.

Yesterday, we saw new pictures of the silver and space gray iPad 5, and today, we see the same thing, shrunk down a spell: the iPad mini 2, in space gray and silver, natch.

Want a new iPhone 5s or iPhone 5c but don’t have the dosh? If you have any smartphone that can boot up, Best Buy will be running a promotion next week where they’ll let you exchange it for $100 off a new iPhone 5c or 5s.

If you don’t know what the upcoming fifth-gen iPad is going to look like by now, you just haven’t been paying attention. We’ve seen leaks on leaks of both the next 10-inch iPad and the second-gen iPad mini, each of which sport a slimmer, more streamlined design.

More photos of the iPad 5 in Space Grey and Silver have surfaced, and they look great. The colors match up with the iPhone 5s color options very well, except for one glaring omission: gold.

We’re still waiting for the iPhone to make its big debut on China Mobile, but we’ve seen lots of evidence to suggest that the move is imminent. The latest indication comes from a job listing on Apple’s China website that seeks a new engineer with extensive knowledge of China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA network.

Apple has today announced that the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c will both reach another 35 countries on Friday, October 25. Italy, Russia, and Spain will be included in the second phase of the new iPhone rollout, along with a number of other countries across Europe and Asia.

The devices will then reach India, Mexico, and more than a dozen more countries on Friday, November 1.

Apple’s iPad event is slated to happen in two weeks on Tuesday, October 22nd, according to the venerable AllThingsD. Not only will the iPad and iPad mini be updated, but the “new Mac Pro and OS X Mavericks will likely get some stage time as well.”

Ever since Phil Schiller admitted that Apple considered making a standalone camera at one point, we’ve wondered what the results would look like if Sir Jony Ive’s obsessive attention to detail was applied to a full-framed camera. As part of Bono’s charity auction for Project (RED), Leica unveiled The Leica M for (RED) designed by Jony Ive and Marc Newson that will be auctioned off at Southeby’s on Nov. 23rd to fight AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.

Jony and Marc redesigned the Leica M by going through a total of 561 models and nearly 1000 prototype parts over 85 days to create the one of a kind camera that features a laser machined aluminum body, and an anodized aluminum outer shell to go with the full-format CMOS sensor inside.

Get a glimpse of all the impeccable details in the gallery below:

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has confirmed that Microsoft Office will come to the iPad just as soon as it’s ready for devices with a touchscreen. Speaking at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Florida today, Ballmer said, “iPad will be picked up when there’s a touch first user interface.”

That user interface is “in progress” Ballmer added, but it’s likely to come to the Windows version of Office first.

Former Apple CEO John Sculley believes Tim Cook is doing a “terrific job” at leading Apple after taking over from Steve Jobs two years ago. Cooks is “continuing the Apple philosophy of no compromise and quality of their products and great styling,” Sculley said, and he commends Cook for “not trying to be Steve Jobs.”

What’d Samsung ripoff from Apple this week? Well, you may have heard that the Galaxy Gear just dropped a few days ago. The reviews have been less than stellar, but to promote its smartwatch Samsung released a commercial that looks a whole lot similar to the very first iPhone commercial Apple dropped at the Oscars in 2007.

The original iPhone ad featured tons of famous movie scenes with someone picking up a phone and saying “hello,” and then a shot of the iPhone was finally shown at the end. Samsung has taken inspiration from Apple and released their own take but all the scenes are people using smartwatches like in Star Trek, Predator, and Inspector gadget.

Take a look a look for yourself and tell us what you think:

Back when the iPhone 5 first came out, there were a surprising number of reports of people whose iPhones suddenly bent themselves. This did not seem to be an issue with accidental damage en masse: most of the people who reported the issue noted that their iPhones bent back at the volume button, and hadn’t been kept in a back pocket or sat on.

It seems with the iPhone 5s, this mysterious predilection towards bending has returned.

Apple bought the Google Now-like app Cue this week. The reason has a lot to do with Apple’s strategy to out-Google Google in the coming war over wearable, and also the future of mobile.

Here’s why the Cue acquisition is really going to matter. 

We’re hearing a lot more of Laurene Powell Jobs’ name lately, with her new media venture, Ozymandias, various philanthropic efforts, her long-standing involvement with College Track, and more recent involvement in immigration reform.

While her name may be more well known to readers of this site as the widow of the Apple founder and superstar, but as time passes since his death, she has been stepping into the spotlight more often, becoming more visible as the world’s ninth richest woman and an active philanthropist in her own right.

As Saturday is the anniversary of Steve Jobs’ passing (and we’ve got an entire Newsstand issue to commemorate it), it seemed fitting to take a closer look at the woman who was by his side since 1991.

Gone but not forgotten: this week Cult of Mac Magazine pays homage to late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

We speak to Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell who knew Jobs back when he was so difficult to be around he landed on the night shift, hear from Cult of Mac publisher Leander Kahney what it was like to cover tech with such an outsize personality always storming the headlines, share some of the best everyday anecdotes from people who encountered Jobs plus take a look at the best tributes to the man called the Edison of our times.

The latest issue is available in the App Store.

We hope you’ll enjoy it – and keep in touch with comments, questions, shout-outs – we’re listening!

Among his many talents, Steve Jobs was one of the great orators and inspiring speakers of our time. Part sage, part showman, Jobs combined the wizardry of a magician with the skills of a master salesman. On this, the second anniversary of his death, we take a video look back at some of his memorable demos, quotes and speeches.

We begin with one of the most influential demos of all – the unveiling of the Macintosh. While many people have seen the 1984 TV commercial, far fewer saw the event in person. Giving a hint of keynotes to come, a tuxedo-clad Jobs and his magical child steal the show on January 24, 1984.

Amazon is gearing up to launch a new set-top box that hopes to compete with the Apple TV and other video streaming devices this holiday, The Wall Street Journal reports. It’s understood the device is small and resembles a Roku, and it will run apps and provide content from a variety of sources, including Amazon’s own Prime service.