MacRumors

Ireland may shut down a tax loophole that allowed Apple to avoid declaring itself a tax resident in any country, reports The Street.

Apple, which currently has multiple subsidiary companies in the Irish city of Cork (Apple Operations International (AOI) Apple Operations Europe, Apple Operations, Apple Sales International and Apple Distribution International), is able to move money around the world without tax penalties because companies managed and controlled abroad but located in Ireland are not subjected to taxes.

"The second measure to be included in the Finance Bill is a change to our company residence rules aimed at eliminating mismatches – that can exist between tax treaty partners in certain circumstances – being used to allow companies to be ‘stateless’ in terms of their place of tax residence," the country said in a press release on Tuesday.

Subsidiary Apple Operations International has come under scrutiny in recent months for exploiting the loophole, as it has received billions of dollars between 2009 and 2011, but paid no taxes to any government. According to Apple’s own statement on the matter, AOI is incorporated in Ireland and therefore not a tax resident in the United States, but as it is controlled via the U.S., it does not meet the tax resident requirements in Ireland either.

According to Reuters, requiring companies to declare a tax residence will have little overall impact on Apple, as Ireland will allow companies to choose any country as a tax residence, including zero tax jurisdictions.

A spokesman for the Department of Finance declined to explain the change but denied it was due to U.S. pressure.

He added that companies could still nominate any country they liked as their tax residence, including zero tax jurisdictions such as Bermuda - a provision that tax advisers said was unusual internationally.

Earlier this year, Apple CEO Tim Cook testified in front of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee of Investigation following an accusation that the company avoided paying billions in federal taxes via “extensive tax-avoidance strategies.”

During the hearing, Tim Cook insisted that Apple pays all of its taxes. "We pay all of the taxes we owe, every single dollar," he said. After an extensive investigation of Apple’s finances and disclosure practices concluded in September, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission opted not to take any action against the company.

Apple has said that it plans to use its extensive foreign cash pile to invest abroad, creating additional Apple Stores overseas, expanding its iTunes Store, and boosting its international marketing.

In line with its usual timing, Apple has just issued media invitations for its October 22 media event where the company is expected to introduce its next-generation iPad and iPad mini models and offer a number of Mac-related announcements, reports AllThingsD. The event will be held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and will begin at 10:00 AM Pacific Time. The invitation tagline reads "We still have a lot to cover."

The October 22 date was first reported by AllThingsD earlier this month, and was quickly confirmed by the The Loop's ever-reliable Jim Dalrymple.

The original AllThingsD report claimed that event will focus on the iPad updates, but that OS X Mavericks and the redesigned Mac Pro will also be featured at the event. Apple is due to release a number of other product updates, perhaps most notably new MacBook Pros, but it is apparently still unclear whether those updates will be a part of next week's event.

Following Apple's announcement that it is hiring Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts to head up its retail and online store effort, CEO Tim Cook has sent an email to employees announcing the hire and giving some additional thoughts on Ahrendts and the hiring process. The full email has been posted by 9to5Mac.

Team,

I am thrilled to announce that Angela Ahrendts will be joining Apple as a senior vice president and member of our executive team, reporting directly to me. Angela is currently the CEO of Burberry.

She will lead both our retail and online teams. I have wanted one person to lead both of these teams for some time because I believe it will better serve our customers, but I had never met anyone whom I felt confident could lead both until I met Angela. We met for the first time last January, and I knew in that meeting that I wanted her to join Apple. We’ve gotten to know each other over the past several months and I’ve left each conversation even more impressed.

She shares our values and our focus on innovation. She places the same strong emphasis as we do on the customer experience. She cares deeply about people and embraces our view that our most important resource and our soul is our people. She believes in enriching the lives of others and she is wicked smart. Angela has shown herself to be an extraordinary leader throughout her career and has a proven track record. She led Burberry through a period of phenomenal growth with a focus on brand, culture, core values and the power of positive energy.

Angela will need to focus over the coming months on transitioning her current role at Burberry and will then join Apple in the spring. I am sure as all of you meet her, you will see why I am so excited that she is joining our executive team. I’d like to add a special thanks to all of our retail leaders. Your strength, talent and leadership afforded me the luxury of taking the time to perform an exhaustive search to find the best person in the world for this role.

Tim

Ahrendts, who previously held positions at Donna Karan and Liz Claiborne, has been CEO of Burberry since 2006. Apple and Burberry last month worked together to film a Burberry fashion shoot entirely with Apple's new iPhone 5s even before it had officially been released, allowing Apple to show off the high-quality camera included on the device.

Update: Former Apple retail chief Ron Johnson told Bloomberg in a statement that Ahrendts is a "terrific choice" and she will be "exceptionally well received" at the company.

The Austin American-Statesman reports that Flextronics America is currently in the middle of a hiring effort that will see the company employing as many as 1,700 workers to build a "next generation desktop computer" at the company's facilities in Austin, Texas. While Flextronics will not reveal the identity of the computer or the company behind it, speculation naturally points toward Apple's radically redesigned Mac Pro.

Flextronics America, which has ramped up hiring and spent tens of millions of dollars to renovate its Northwest Austin factory over the past two years, will start manufacturing a "next generation desktop computer" at the upgraded plant, according to a presentation it filed Monday with Travis County commissioners.

The document, part of a push by the computer and electronics manufacturer to have its Central Texas facilities designated as a foreign trade zone, suggests the company already created 879 jobs for the project and could add another 815 positions if it hits peak targets.

Flextronics had previously been named as Apple's contract manufacturer for the Mac Pro as part of an effort to bring some Mac production back to the United States, but we had received an unconfirmed tip that Flextronics would be using its facility in Fort Worth, Texas where it manufactures the Moto X smartphone.

It appears that the company will instead be using its Austin facilities that are less than a mile from Apple's existing operations campus where it employees roughly 4,000 workers. That campus is currently undergoing a major expansion that will see Apple spending over $300 million to add at least 3,600 new employees there over ten years.

Apple announced back in June that the new Mac Pro would be launching later this year, and the machine is expected to be featured at the company's media event reportedly scheduled for next Tuesday.

Apple is set to release refreshed MacBook Pro models, new iPads, and the newly designed Mac Pro all by mid-November, according to French website MacGeneration [Google Translate]. The report shares target dates for each new product, with the new MacBook Pros with Intel's Haswell processors expected to be released on October 24 or 25, the iPad 5 and iPad mini 2 on October 30 or 31, and the release of the Mac Pro expected on November 15.

The website's projection for a new line of MacBook Pros is somewhat likely, with both the 13-inch and 15-inch models showing up in benchmarks over the past couple of months as a release has seemed inevitable. The new line of laptops is expected boast improved battery life due to Intel's power-efficient Haswell processors, along with the more powerful "Iris" integrated graphics found in the chipset. Other potential features for the upcoming laptops include faster PCI Express-based flash storage, as well as faster 802.11ac "Gigabit" Wi-Fi.

Meanwhile, an expected release of the fifth-generation iPad and the second-generation iPad mini seems less likely on the given days of Ocotber 30 or 31, due to the iPad 4 and iPad mini launching on Friday, November 2 last year. Traditionally, Apple's major iOS devices have launched on the Friday of the week after the initial announcement, and thus it would appear more likely that the iPad 5 and iPad mini 2 would launch on Friday, November 1. The next-generation iPad is expected to feature a thinner design, while the upcoming iPad mini is set to feature a high-resolution Retina display.

The projected November 15 release of Apple's radically redesigned Mac Pro does seem probable, as the company announced the device back in June at WWDC for a Fall 2013 release, with the expected day of release coming two weeks before the "Black Friday" holiday shopping date across the United States. The new Mac Pro features a compact cylindrical design, along with Ivy Bridge E Xeon processors, dual AMD FirePro graphics chips, and fast PCI Express-based flash storage among other professional-grade internals.

Apple is expected to unveil both the fifth-generation iPad and the second-generation iPad mini during an October 22 event that will also showcase other Apple products such as OS X Mavericks, the Mac Pro, and potentially may also include the announcement of a refreshed MacBook Pro line.

It should be noted that MacGeneration has a mixed track record on its rumor claims, although the site claims that the source for this report had previously accurately shared word of the 16 GB iPod touch released earlier this year. But one recent high-profile miss for the site was a September claim [Google Translate] that Apple's iPad and Mac media event would take place today, October 15.

Apple announced that it has hired Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry, as Senior Vice President of Retail and Online Stores. According to the press release, Ahrendts will have oversight of the strategic direction, expansion and operation of both Apple retail and online stores.

“I am thrilled that Angela will be joining our team,” said Cook. “She shares our values and our focus on innovation, and she places the same strong emphasis as we do on the customer experience. She has shown herself to be an extraordinary leader throughout her career and has a proven track record.”

Ahrendts will join Apple in the spring and will continue her role as Burberry CEO until then.

“I am profoundly honored to join Apple in this newly created position next year, and very much look forward to working with the global teams to further enrich the consumer experience on and offline,” said Ahrendts. “I have always admired the innovation and impact Apple products and services have on people’s lives and hope in some small way I can help contribute to the company’s continued success and leadership in changing the world.”

The head role of Apple's retail stores has had significant turnover in the past couple of years. Ron Johnson left Apple in 2011 after having been at Apple for eleven years and is widely credited for building up their retail initiative. Johnson was replaced by John Browett who lasted less than a year at Apple.

Valve has released a video demonstrating its Steam Controller, a handheld gaming controller that will eventually be compatible with many Steam games, including popular titles like Portal, Counterstrike and Team Fortress.

The Steam Controller is designed to work with all the games on Steam: past, present, and future. Even the older titles in the catalog and the ones which were not built with controller support. (We’ve fooled those older games into thinking they’re being played with a keyboard and mouse, but we’ve designed a gamepad that’s nothing like either one of those devices.) We think you’ll agree that we’re onto something with the Steam Controller

The Steam Controller includes a touch screen in the center of the device with a pair of trackpads around the outside using "super-precise" haptic feedback and "dual linear resonant actuators" to deliver a range of force and vibration feedback sensations.

The Steam Controller is currently in beta and is designed to work primarily with the Steam Machine set-top box. It will also work with any PC version of Steam, including Steam for Mac.

As Samsung's home country of South Korea approaches connected device saturation, Apple's share of the market is dwarfed by Samsung's share, according to a new report from mobile analytics firm Flurry.

Of a total of 33,527,534 active smartphones and tablets in South Korea, Apple iPads and iPhones make up 14 percent. Samsung devices, including larger phone/tablet hybrids, make up 60 percent of all connected devices. LG and Pantech are also popular in the country, with 10 and 15 percent share, respectively.

Based on rapid device adoption in 2011 and 2012 and slowing adoption numbers in 2013, Flurry suggests South Korea is the first market to approach connected device saturation, serving as an early indicator of what smartphone adoption might look like in other worldwide markets as mobile market growth begins to slow.

As shown in the graph, that growth has slowed markedly in the past year or so, and has even been negative in some months. That implies that the South Korean connected device market either already is, or will soon be, the first in the world to reach saturation. As such, it provides a good early indicator of what other markets can expect once the rapid growth period the mobile market has experienced over the past few years ends.

Unlike other parts of the world, however, phone/tablet hybrids more commonly known as "phablets" are highly popular in South Korea. While 41 percent of connected devices in South Korea are phablets, the hybrids remain fairly unpopular in the rest of the world, making up just 7 percent of the market. Tablets were also more popular worldwide, making up 19 percent of connected devices, compared to just 5 percent in South Korea.

As noted during Apple's third quarter financial results call, though the iPhone remains less popular in South Korea, it topped a customer satisfaction survey [Google Translation] in the country, outpacing Samsung by two percent.

As companies like Samsung, LG, and HTC continue to produce larger smartphones, Apple too is said to be experimenting with additional iPhone sizes ranging from 4.8 inches to 6 inches, which could shift more of the market in Samsung’s home country towards Apple in the future.