MacRumors

The Reno Gazette-Journal reports that Apple has proposed investing up to $1 billion over the next ten years to build a new data center and other facilities in the Reno, Nevada area. The data center would be located in unincorporated Washoe County, while a "business and purchasing center" would be located in a business park in downtown Reno.

Today, the Washoe County Board of Commissioners is considering abatements for Apple’s planned data center in the Reno Technology Park, located east of Sparks along Interstate 80.

Mike Folks, an Apple spokesman, said the company planning for the project to become operational later this year.

“We’re looking at a 30-year relationship,” Folks told commissioners.

The data center, codenamed "Project Jonathan", is said to be planned to generate nearly 600 construction jobs and as many as 41 direct and 200 contractor jobs upon opening.

Apple currently operates a major data center in Maiden, North Carolina and a much smaller one in Newark, California near the companies headquarters. Apple is also investing $250 million in a new data center in Prineville, Oregon.

Update: Apple has issued a statement to AllThingsD confirming its intent for the area.

“We hope to build Apple’s next data center in Reno to support Apple’s iTunes Store, App Store and incredibly popular iCloud services,” Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet told AllThingsD. “If approved, this project would expand our presence in Nevada and create hundreds of construction jobs over the next year, plus permanent jobs at the data center which will add to our existing total of nearly 400 employees in the state.”

Earlier this month, it was reported that Apple would be launching a standalone podcast app in iOS 6. Instead of waiting for the next version of iOS, Apple posted the Podcast app on the App Store today. [App Store]

Podcasts app is the easiest way to discover, subscribe to and play your favorite podcasts on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Explore hundreds of thousands of free audio and video podcasts from the Podcasts Catalog, and play the most popular podcasts, organized for you by topic, with the all-new Top Stations feature.

Features:

- Enjoy all of your audio and video podcasts in a single app
- Explore hundreds of thousands of podcasts including shows in over 40 languages
- Try the innovative new Top Stations feature to find new podcast series in a variety of topics, including arts, business, comedy, music, news, sports, and more.
- Browse by Audio or Video podcasts, or see what's most popular in Top Charts
- Tap subscribe for your favorites and automatically receive new episodes for free as they become available
- Stream episodes or download to listen while offline
- Skip forward and back using simple playback controls
- Turn on Sleep Timer to automatically stop playing a podcast while listening in bed
- Share your favorite episodes with friends using Twitter, Messages and Mail
- Optionally sync your favorite episodes from iTunes on your Mac or PC
- Sync your episode playback for seamless transition between devices

The app supports streaming or downloading of episodes and offers syncing of episode playback between devices. This means that users can, for example, start listening to a podcast on their iPhone and finish on the iPad.

Update: Some users have noticed a redeem button within the Podcast app suggesting the possibility of paid podcasts down the line.

Podcasts is a free download for the iPhone and iPad on the App Store. [Direct Link]

Brightcove announced today the introduction of App Cloud Core, a free edition of the company's app platform that allows developers to create native iOS apps using HTML5 and JavaScript. In addition, one of the major new features of the API is the ability for developers to easily create dual-screen apps for iOS devices to broadcast content to the Apple TV over AirPlay.

The new solution enables media publishers to develop rich content apps for the iPhone and iPad that simultaneously control content, data and information presented on an HDTV while displaying synchronized content on the iPad or iPhone. The unique dual-screen solution leverages Apple's AirPlay technology, which allows viewers to use applications that simultaneously present content, interactive options and data on both the touch device and an Apple TV.

This ability to broadcast separate content to a user's device and Apple TV is not new (Real Racing 2 HD Demo), but the new APIs provide another easy way for developers to implement these features. Brightcove offers this demo of how it can be used:

There's been a lot of attention to how Apps might work on a television interface. Microsoft recently announced a new technology called SmartGlass which offers a two-way Airplay-like standard that allows mobile devices to act as second screens for content being displayed on TV from an Xbox.

Beyond Apple's own efforts with AirPlay, there has been rumors that Apple might take it a step further with a fully developed Apple TV app model as well as the possibility of a full Apple television set in the near future.

Fortune reports that Apple's iPhone has dropped from the top selling smartphone position in Verizon retail stores for the first time since the carrier started selling the device. The news comes by way of a research note from William Blair's Anil Doradla.

Doradla attributes the iPhone's fall from grace less to the usual slowdown in advance of a new model than to Verizon's aggressive marketing of competing 4G devices, particularly Motorola's Droid RAZR MAXX, which the carrier is selling for $299 with a 2-year contract.

The results are based on "channel checks" from the April-May-June quarter of 2012. The iPhone was reportedly dethroned by the Motorola Droid RAZR MAXX, but remains in the number two spot ahead of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

Verizon first started carrying the iPhone in February 2011. Verizon benefited from pent up demand at launch and the subsequent launch of the iPhone 4S in October of that same year. The iPhone 4S is now 8 months since it's release with rumors that the next generation iPhone will launch this fall.

Update: A separate analyst claims that the iPhone 4S remains the top selling smarpthone at Verizon.

But that's not the case, according to Walkley, who said while the latest Razr is "gaining ground," it "hasn't caught iPhone." His own research has found the iPhone 4S as the top selling smartphone at Verizon, as well as AT&T and Sprint, for the entirety of 2012 thus far.

AllThingsD reports on an interesting survey from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) studying the balance of iPhone sales among the three major U.S. carriers at various points of sale such as Apple's retail stores, Best Buy, and warehouse clubs and mass market retailers.

The survey shows that AT&T remains the clear market leader for the iPhone in the United States, registering at 62% in aggregate and followed by Verizon at 26% and Sprint at just 12%. But the most interesting data pertains to the Sprint iPhone specifically, which represents just 9% of Apple retail store iPhone sales compared to 18-19% at other retailers.

The report suggests that legacy availability is the prime reason for the difference in popularity at the different sales outlets, with customers likely to return to their previous points of purchase when it comes time to buy new phones and remain loyal to their carriers. With Sprint being the newest entrant of the three when it comes to the iPhone, its customers tend to return to Best Buy and other long-time Sprint retailers to purchase an iPhone rather going to an Apple retail store.

In other words, if you bought an iPhone from Apple on AT&T or Verizon and you return to the store to buy another, you’re not likely to switch carriers. And since Apple Stores have sold only AT&T and Verizon iPhones for so long, Sprint’s seeing a bit less traction there than it is at retailers like Best Buy, where it has had a longer-term presence.

“Sprint is really suffering from being third to the dance,” CIRP partner Michael Levin told AllThingsD. “At the Apple Store and other carrier-agnostic retailers, there is still very little switching, and Sprint just doesn’t have enough existing customers walking through the door. … AT&T’s installed base of iPhone customers and Verizon’s huge, satisfied customer base are proving a barrier to Sprint growing its market share.”

Beyond the three major carriers, Apple has also been expanding its reach by bringing the iPhone to a number of smaller regional and super-regional carriers, and most recently began an expansion into the U.S. prepaid market with Cricket last week and Virgin Mobile USA later this week.

Travel shopping site Orbitz is offering more expensive hotels to Mac users because the company found Mac users prefer more luxurious rooms, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Orbitz noted that it was is not showing different prices for the same room to different users, but was presenting pricier hotels more prominently to Mac users than those using Windows. Users can rank hotel options by price and get the same listings no matter what platform they are using.

Orbitz found Mac users on average spend $20 to $30 more a night on hotels than their PC counterparts, a significant margin given the site's average nightly hotel booking is around $100, chief scientist Wai Gen Yee said. Mac users are 40% more likely to book a four- or five-star hotel than PC users, Mr. Yee said, and when Mac and PC users book the same hotel, Mac users tend to stay in more expensive rooms.

"We had the intuition, and we were able to confirm it based on the data," Orbitz Chief Technology Officer Roger Liew said.

The WSJ goes on to note that the average household income for adult owners of Macs is $98,560, according to Forrester Research, versus $74,452 for a PC owner. The paper also says that some high-end hotels see bookings from Mac users hugely out of proportion with their user share on Orbitz.

The targeting efforts are part of Orbitz's "predictive analytics" efforts -- using gathered data to offer more tailored results to shoppers in order to generate more revenue.

Apple has issued a new update for Mountain Lion Developer Preview 4 via the Mac App Store. It was first noticed by Twitter user @Lhunar and introduces the new Mountain Lion Security Update system.

The new system does daily checks for security updates as Apple ramps up its security protocols in the next-generation operating system. Earlier this month, it was noticed that Apple had changed the language on its OS X marketing pages following the Flashback malware attack earlier this year.

The new security system in Mountain Lion -- including Gatekeeper and other features -- appears to be a significant expansion of the XProtect system that Apple has used in the past to try to thwart OS X malware.

OS X Security Update Test 1.0 -- Restart Required

This update tests the new Mountain Lion Security Updates system. The new system includes:

- Daily Checks for required security updates
- The ability to install required security updates automatically or after restarting your Mac
- A more secure connection to Apple's update servers.

This update includes general updates and improvements to Mountain Lion Developer Preview 4.

The update weighs in at 1.16GB and is available to developers with Mountain Lion DP4 installed via the Mac App Store.

Apple has released an over-the-air update to the iOS 6 Beta which was first released after the WWDC keynote on June 11. The update weighs in at 332MB for iPhone 4S users.

Beta 2 has a build number of 10A5338d, up from Beta 1's build number of 10A5316k. Apple also released Xcode 4.5 Developer Preview 2 and Apple TV Software beta 2.

Setting icon gears rotate while downloading.

Computerworld Australia reports on a blog post from Sophos security expert Graham Cluley published earlier this month detailing changes to Apple's "Why you'll love a Mac" OS X marketing pages on the topic of security. The changes, which come after a significant malware attack from Flashback earlier this year, focus more of the text of OS X's built-in security features rather than implying Macs are immune to viruses and suggesting that users do not need to take any action to protect themselves.

Apple removed the previous statement "It doesn't get PC viruses" and replaced it with "It's built to be safe," and "Safeguard your data. By doing nothing" with "Safety. Built in." [...]

In addition to changing its marketing messages, Apple has released a security guide for the iPhone operating system iOS and announced in February that OS X 10.8, or Mountain Lion, would include a new feature called Gatekeeper that would restrict which applications users can install on their devices.

Beyond the increased security features such as Gatekeeper making their way into OS X Mountain Lion, Apple is also working to reduce vulnerabilities in third-party platforms such as Java that are frequently exploited by malware authors. Apple has been working to shift responsibility for Java updates to the OpenJDK in order to make them more timely and has also been pushing out software updates to disable Java by default if it goes unused for a period of time.

9to5Mac reports that it has reanalyzed the previously-obtained hardware code dump for Apple's next-generation iPhone prototypes and discovered that the code makes reference to hardware components supporting near field communication (NFC) capabilities.

We’ve previously been able to pull data from PreEVT iPhone 5,1 and iPhone 5,2 prototypes codenamed N41AP (5,1) and N42AP (5,2), which leads us to believe that the new iPhone will have a bigger 1136×640 display. We also detailed a lot of the hardware here but forgot one very important little bit. Further investigation into this hardware code dump leads us to believe that these iPhones also have Near Field Communication (NFC) controllers directly connected to the power management unit (PMU).

NFC enables short-range wireless communication between devices and chip readers, with the most high-profile deployment of the technology being for contact-less payment systems.

Rumors of NFC support for the iPhone have been circulating for some time, with The New York Times giving a substantial boost to the discussion back in March 2011 with its claims that the technology would be available in a "coming iteration of the Apple iPhone - although not necessarily the next one". NFC did not arrive in the iPhone 4S released last October, and thus expectations for the 2012 iPhone and NFC have been heightened.

Apple did not directly address the topic of NFC in iOS 6 at its Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month, but the company did announce a new Passbook digital wallet app which strongly suggests that company is moving toward offering NFC services. As announced, Passbook serves as a time- and location-aware app for storing digital tickets, coupons, loyalty cards, and more.

Your boarding passes, movie tickets, retail coupons, loyalty cards, and more are now all in one place. With Passbook, you can scan your iPhone or iPod touch to check in for a flight, get into a movie, and redeem a coupon. You can also see when your coupons expire, where your concert seats are, and the balance left on that all-important coffee bar card. Wake your iPhone or iPod touch, and passes appear on your Lock screen at the appropriate time and place — like when you reach the airport or walk into the store to redeem your gift card or coupon. And if your gate changes after you’ve checked in for your flight, Passbook will even alert you to make sure you’re not relaxing in the wrong terminal.

Adding an NFC component to Passbook would be a natural step to eliminate the need to physically scan barcodes on the iPhone's screen, allowing users to simply wave their devices near readers to activate Passbook items.

In the latest installment of its "iEconomy" series of articles, The New York Times takes a look at Apple's retail stores, examining the compensation offered to its employees responsible for fueling booming sales in the division. The article features quotes from a number of former Apple retail store employees, including MacRumors' own Jordan Golson.

The new report takes the stance that Apple is not paying its retail staff enough given the success of the stores, instead relying on its employees' devotion to the company and a strong fan base providing a massive pool of job applicants to keep its retail stores staffed.

Within this world, the Apple Store is the undisputed king, a retail phenomenon renowned for impeccable design, deft service and spectacular revenues. Last year, the company’s 327 global stores took in more money per square foot than any other United States retailer — wireless or otherwise — and almost double that of Tiffany, which was No. 2 on the list, according to the research firm RetailSails.

Worldwide, its stores sold $16 billion in merchandise.

But most of Apple’s employees enjoyed little of that wealth. While consumers tend to think of Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., as the company’s heart and soul, a majority of its workers in the United States are not engineers or executives with hefty salaries and bonuses but rather hourly wage earners selling iPhones and MacBooks.

The report notes that roughly 70% of Apple's 43,000 U.S. workers are retail store employees, with many of them earning in the neighborhood of $25,000 per year. Apple's pay rates are above average for the retail sector, but the Times argues that with each retail store employee bringing in an average of $500,000 in sales per year Apple is not a typical retailer.

The latest iEconomy report comes just days after Apple began offering raises of up to 25% to many of its retail store employees, with speculation suggesting that the move was made to address the criticism set to appear in the report. Apple last week also launched new employee hardware discounts of $500 off of a Mac or $250 off of an iPad, on top of existing 25% employee discounts.

(Photo by Win McNamee/Reuters)

Earlier today, Instapaper developer Marco Arment published his thoughts on a potential timeline for upgrades to Apple's iMac and Mac Pro lines, initially suggesting that the need for an ultra-high resolution 5120x2880 Retina display (either inside the 27-inch iMac or as a standalone display) is likely the most significant hurdle to major updates for those lines.

With ABC News having reported in May that Apple was planning to bring Retina displays to its next-generation iMac line and suggestions of updated models potentially being right around the corner, anticipation has been high for new Retina iMacs. But shortly after publishing his speculation, Arment is now hearing that while the next iMac update will come later this year, it will not include Retina displays.

I’ve now heard from multiple sources that while an iMac update is indeed coming this fall, it will not have Retina displays.

Arment describes some of the issues surrounding Retina displays at the size needed for the 27-inch iMac, including production yield and insufficient bandwidth, but it is unclear why Apple would wait until the fall to update the iMac if those issues will prevent Retina displays from being included in that revision. Even without a Retina display, updated iMac models could take advantage of Ivy Bridge processors, improved graphics chips, and USB 3.0, and those upgrades could be included in a new model any time now.

As we noted earlier today, vacation blackouts at a third-party technical support firm are hinting at a release of OS X Mountain Lion in late July, and it seems possible that Apple could follow last year's trend of a simultaneous hardware/software launch by introducing new Ivy Bridge iMacs and perhaps Mac minis alongside Mountain Lion. That speculation is, however, yet to be supported by any specific rumors or evidence.

Following the keynote at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month, company representatives were initially quoted as saying that updated Mac Pro and iMac designs were due "later next year", but the company moved to clarify those remarks as applying only to the Mac Pro, suggesting that iMac updates will come ahead of that timeframe.

Steve Jobs was a frequent guest at All Things D's annual D Conference, appearing six times with D hosts Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. After he passed away last year, Swisher and Mossberg felt it was important to have a session honoring Jobs and his legacy.

They asked Dr. Ed Catmull, who worked with Jobs for years at Pixar, as well as Larry Ellison, the legendary CEO of Oracle who was one of Jobs' closest friends, to appear and reflect on Jobs' life.

Dr. Catmull also did a separate one-on-one interview with Kara Swisher. He discussed the history of Pixar, computer animation, and shared some fascinating stories about his experiences working with Jobs at both Pixar and Disney.

Image courtesy Asa Mathat/All Things D