MacRumors

The New York Times reports on Apple CEO Tim Cook's presence at the annual Allen & Co. media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, noting that he is easily earning the title of "Mr. Popular" due to Apple's rare presence at the event.

The conference, full of media bigwigs, has also been buzzing about any blueprints Mr. Cook may be hiding in Apple’s magic hat. He has lined up several one-on-one meetings with media executives here, fueling speculation that he is busy cobbling together partnerships for a home entertainment expansion.

Cook has been keeping a relatively low profile at the conference so far, but he did note that he was "looking forward" to those meetings.

When asked what he was looking forward to at the conference, Mr. Cook smiled. “I’m looking forward to all the private discussions I’ve set up this week,” he said.

Would he have time for coffee with DealBook?

The polite Mr. Cook simply replied, “Probably not.”

Steve Jobs was occasionally found on the invitation list for the Sun Valley conference, including as late as 2010, but his last appearance at the event came in 2005.

Amazon today announced the launch of its new "GameCircle" feature for the Kindle Fire tablet, a set of tools similar to Apple's Game Center that will allow users to chart achievements, compete with others via leaderboards, and sync game progress across devices via the cloud.

GameCircle will make achievements, leaderboards and sync APIs accessible, simple and quick for you to integrate, and will give gamers a more seamless and entertaining in-game experience.

Amazon's GameCircle appears to lack the social aspects in Game Center such as specifying groups of friends and initiating head-to-head gameplay, but its core features are otherwise very similar to what is offered in Game Center while folding in cross-device syncing that some iOS developers have embraced via iCloud.

Meanwhile, MarketWatch provides a bit more color on Amazon's rumored smartphone project, noting that the company is currently testing prototypes with displays in the range of four to five inches.

Officials at some of Amazon's parts suppliers, who declined to be named, said the Seattle-based company is testing a smartphone and mass production of the new device may start late this year or early next year. [...]

One person said that the screen of Amazon's smartphone currently being tested measures between four and five inches.

As screen sizes on Android phones have increased to beyond four inches, Apple is also said to be planning a boost for the iPhone's screen that has measured 3.5 inches diagonally since the device's launch in 2007. The next-generation iPhone is said to include a screen of approximately 4 inches, with rumors suggesting that Apple will increase the height of the screen while maintain the current width.

With Apple having seeded the golden master build of OS X Mountain Lion to developers earlier this week, the company has locked in which Macs will support the forthcoming version of the operating system. While the machine requirements have been known for some time, the seeding of the final public release is a good time to remind users which machines will support Mountain Lion.

Your Mac must be one of the following models:

- iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
- MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
- MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
- MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
- Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
- Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
- Xserve (Early 2009)

Ars Technica has more on Apple's decision, including discussion of why Apple has dropped support for some early 64-bit Macs that do support OS X Lion.

Apple declined to tell us the reasoning behind leaving some of these models out of potential Mountain Lion upgrades, but we suspected it was related to an updated graphics architecture that was designed to improve OS X's graphics subsystem going forward. Our own Andrew Cunningham suspected the issue was related to graphics drivers, since the GPUs not supported under Mountain Lion had drivers that were written before 64-bit support was common.

Information included with the first Mountain Lion GM now corroborates the connection to 32-bit graphics drivers as the culprit. While Mountain Lion is compatible with any Mac capable of running a 64-bit kernel, the kernel no longer supports loading 32-bit kernel extensions (KEXTs).

The report notes that some of the GPUs used in early 64-bit Macs were deprecated before 64-bit KEXTs were in common usage, and thus they were never upgraded from their original 32-bit KEXTs. With the affected machines now being a number of years old, Apple apparently decided that it was not worth investing the resources to upgrade those drivers to 64-bit in order to support OS X Mountain Lion.

Late last week, we noted that Apple had pulled all of its qualifying Mac products from the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) registry for environmental ratings.

The move, which is said to have been related to Apple's design decisions that will disqualify its new and upcoming products from the registry, has the potential to impact Apple's presence in governmental and institutional purchasing. The city of San Francisco is among the first entities to act on Apple's withdrawal, announcing that it will bar most municipal Mac purchases.

Apple has now issued a statement to The Loop addressing its environmental outlook and its commitment to continue meeting other modern standards like Energy Star.

“Apple takes a comprehensive approach to measuring our environmental impact and all of our products meet the strictest energy efficiency standards backed by the US government, Energy Star 5.2,” Apple representative Kristin Huguet, told The Loop. “We also lead the industry by reporting each product’s greenhouse gas emissions on our website, and Apple products are superior in other important environmental areas not measured by EPEAT, such as removal of toxic materials.”

The Loop's Jim Dalrymple notes that even EPEAT acknowledges that many of its standards are outdated, with Apple apparently believing that those criteria have become too restrictive and do not address the full gamut of the company's environmental commitments.

Just after posting photos of a purported metal engineering sample of the next-generation iPhone's massing, Gotta Be Mobile has now posted photos of a similar physical model of the "iPad mini".

The model appears to be a case maker's mold that shows the basic shape of the device, so it is unknown whether it accurately reflects the device's form factor. While case designs have proven accurate a number of times in the past, a significant number of case makers were fooled into designing for a tapered iPhone design last year that did not come to fruition.

According to the report, a pixel count on the photos suggests that the iPad mini will measure approximately 213 mm by 143 mm and be slightly thinner than the full-size iPad.

What we’ve found, using a pixel count, is that the iPad Mini should be around 213.36mm tall and about 143.67mm wide. This is approximately two-thirds of the size of the new third-generation iPad. The new iPad is 185.67mm wide, 241.3mm tall, and 9.39mm thick.

Google’s Nexus 7 tablet has a width of 120mm which means that the iPad Mini, if our calculations are close, might be around 23.67mm wider than the Nexus 7. The Nexus 7 tablet measures in at 198.5mm high which means that the iPad Mini may be a little taller than Google’s 7-inch tablet.

The mockup also includes a smaller dock connector as has been rumored by a number of sources, as well as two speaker grilles along the bottom edge of the device.

With rumors of an "iPad mini" launch in the coming months ramping up, there has been much discussion about just how usable such a device would be running at the 1024x768 resolution of pre-Retina iPad models. In particular, some commenters have pointed to Steve Jobs' October 2010 discussion of the 7-inch tablets from competitors that were just then hitting the market, where he outlined Apple's belief that such tablets were too small to be useful.

While we argued as long ago as last December that scaling the iPad display down to a rumored 7.85-inch screen would still maintain usability and we provided iPad- and print- friendly examples to allow users to test for themselves, many have remain unconvinced of the benefits of a smaller iPad.

Daring Fireball's John Gruber now takes another detailed look at what an iPad mini would entail, arguing that a 7.85-inch display on an iPad mini would be a very different experience from the 7-inch screen being used by competitors such as Amazon's Kindle Fire and Google's Nexus 7.

So, how can we square the idea of Apple making an iPad Mini with Jobs’s remarks from just a year and a half ago? We could point out (again) that 7.85 inches is closer to 8 inches than 7, and that the exact size of the purported iPad Mini display offers 66 percent of the surface area of a 9.7-inch iPad, not 45 percent [as is the case with a 7-inch display]. We could point out (again) that, assuming Apple-recommended 44-point user interface tap targets on a display with 163 points per inch, it should offer tap targets of the exact same physical size as every iPhone made to date, thus avoiding the need for Apple to include sandpaper with the device.

Gruber goes on to note that Jobs was panning small, expensive tablets running a version of Android never intended to be used on devices larger than phones and that the tablets hitting the market today are very different products. He also points to Jobs' repeated efforts at misdirection in which he publicly spoke out against certain ideas even as Apple was pursuing them, as well as Jobs' ability to quickly and decisively change his mind at times.

Beyond the size of the iPad mini, Gruber also addresses the topic of a non-Retina display in the device, suggesting that with Apple seeking to keep pricing down the display will be one of the main ways it can achieve its desired pricing while retaining significant margins. The iPad mini would naturally gain a Retina display a year or two down the road as pricing continues to drop.

Finally, in addressing pricing on the rumored iPad mini Gruber suggests that Apple could approach the $199 pricing seen on the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7 by leveraging its massive supply chain and economies of scale to bring its own costs down to the neighborhood of $150 and still maintain profitability. But even pricing of $249 could be competitive depending on hardware features and factoring in the benefits of Apple's extensive iOS/iTunes/App Store ecosystem for customers.

Amid continued rumors that Apple intends to release a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro in the coming months, a Geekbench 2 benchmark submitted late last month as a "MacBookPro10,2" appears to represent the machine in question.

In comparison, the new non-Retina 13-inch MacBook Pro carries the model identifier "MacBookPro9,2", while the 15-inch non-Retina model is "MacBookPro9,1" and the corresponding Retina model is "MacBookPro10,1".

While the machine name of MacBookPro10,2 on the new entry could be faked, other information included in the Geekbench result is consistent with what would be expected on the new machine. The machine is listed as running a 2.9 GHz Intel Core i7-3520M processor, which is offered in the high-end model of the non-Retina 13-inch MacBook Pro. The machine is also listed as running Build 12A2056 of OS X Mountain Lion, with the four-digit build number suffix frequently being used on Apple's custom operating system builds.

In addition, the motherboard identifier of AFD8A9D944EA4843 previously surfaced as a new machine in early builds of OS X Mountain Lion. While many of the other new motherboard identifiers found in Mountain Lion were accounted for with Apple's MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models released last month, the identity of AFD8A9D944EA4843 has remained unknown. Finally, the machine's score of 7806 is on par with results seen for the non-Retina model running the same processor.

One inconsistency, however, is the listing of just 4 GB of RAM on the Geekbench result. The 2.9 GHz Core i7 processor is paired with 8 GB of RAM even on the non-Retina 13-inch MacBook Pro, although prototype machines could have different configurations.

Back in May, similar Geekbench benchmarks for what turned out to be the non-Retina 15-inch MacBook Pro, as well as a revamped iMac, surfaced in the results browser. The revamped iMac has, however, yet to see a public launch.

(Thanks, Matthew!)

Japanese blog Mac Otakara reports that Apple will be redesigning the iPod nano later this year with a new form factor that more closely resembles an iPod touch. According to the report, the iPod nano will apparently sport a rectangular screen and a home button similar to that found on iOS devices.

Given that the screen size on this redesigned iPod nano would appear to be substantially smaller than the iPhone/iPod touch, it seems unlikely that the iPod nano would run iOS apps. Instead, Apple is likely to use a custom operating system and apps skinned to resemble iOS as found on the current incarnation of the iPod nano.

The report also indicates that Apple will be bringing a "dedicated new iTunes service" to the device, but there is no word on what that service would entail.

Apple's iPod lines have generally trended to smaller form factors with each redesign, but this rumored redesign would appear to mark a substantial increase in size from the current form factor, which was introduced in September 2010. Several leaked photos have suggested that Apple planned to add a camera to the smaller form factor, but it appears that the company may have ultimately scrapped those plans.

It would not be unprecedented, however, for Apple to decide that smaller is not necessarily better, particularly if the iPod nano can see increased functionality with the new design. Apple famously removed virtually all buttons from the iPod shuffle in March 2009 as it moved controls to the headphone cord, but a September 2010 redesign saw the return of the click wheel and other on-device buttons.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission are nearing a deal that would see Google paying a record $22.5 million fine over its tactics to circumvent privacy settings in Safari on iOS to track users' behavior.

The fine is expected to be the largest penalty ever levied on a single company by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. It offers the latest sign of the FTC's stepped-up approach to policing online privacy violations, coming just six months after The Wall Street Journal reported on Google's practices.

The case centers on a loophole in Safari's default privacy settings, with Google taking advantage of the hole to make the browser think that the user was interacting with a given ad, thus allowing a tracking cookie to be installed. With that cookie installed, it became easy for Google to add additional cookies and to track users across the web as they visited other sites displaying ads from Google's networks.

Google has argued that the tracking was unintentional and that it did not harm consumers, but the Federal Trade Commission pointed to previous statements by Google regarding Safari's privacy settings as evidence that the company was misrepresenting its privacy practices.

Google's tactics are also under scrutiny from a number of state attorneys general, who may yet pursue additional action against the company.

Just before last month's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo correctly predicted that Apple's MacBook Pro with Retina display would appear alongside the standard MacBook Pro instead of as a direct replacement, also accurately claiming that only the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro would be making an appearance while a 13-inch model remained in the works.

At the time, Kuo believed that Apple could have the 13-inch version ready by August, but in the wake of WWDC he revised his predictions to indicate that Apple would begin ramping production in September for a launch in October.

Digitimes now reports that while Apple has been included among other PC vendors amid rumors of delayed or decreased shipments, the company's plans for the Retina 13-inch MacBook Pro are in fact on track and may even see a debut "before October" in order to address the back to school market.

As for Apple, the sources pointed out that Apple has demanded its upstream partners start supplying components for the 13-inch model in the third quarter and they have not yet heard anything about changing of schedule. As for when the product will launch, the sources believe the new MacBook Pro will have a chance to launch before October to catch up with the back-to-school season.

Apple also did not reduce its shipment forecast for 2012 and is still expecting its notebook shipments to grow 30% on year, the sources pointed out.

After a relatively slow start to 2012 as Apple awaited the launch of Intel's Ivy Bridge processors, the company appears to be setting itself up for a busy second half of the year. Even after a strong upgrade to its MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lines at WWDC, Apple still has plenty of products apparently still in the pipeline, including a new iPhone expected later this year, rumors of an "iPad mini", 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro models, and an update to the iMac line.

Following last week's news that Apple had pulled all 39 of its qualifying Macs from the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) registry, it was suggested that Apple would lose business with federal, state, and local governments in the United States. Many agencies require that most or all computer purchases be limited to products listed on the EPEAT registry.

As noted by The Wall Street Journal's CIO Journal, the city of San Francisco has become one of the first such entities to confirm that it will be barring most purchases of Apple computers.

Officials with the San Francisco Department of Environment told CIO Journal on Monday they would send out letters over the next two weeks,informing all 50 of the city’s agencies that Apple laptops and desktops “will no longer qualify” for purchase with city funds. [...]

“We are disappointed that Apple chose to withdraw from EPEAT,” said Melanie Nutter, director of San Francisco’s Department of Environment, “and we hope that the city saying it will not buy Apple products will make Apple reconsider its participation.”

City agencies will still be able to ask for waivers of the policy, but San Francisco’s chief information officer Jon Walton calls that process a "long" and "onerous" one that will make it "very problematic to procure Apple products."

The report notes that the impact of San Francisco's decision on Apple's bottom line will be negligible given that only about 1-2% of the city's computers are Macs, representing 500-700 machines. The most recent city data available from 2010 listed purchases totaling roughly $45,000 in Macs and iPads, and iPad purchases would continue to be allowed given the absence of any EPEAT registry for tablets.

Still, with many other governmental agencies potentially making similar purchasing decisions related to Apple's withdrawal from the EPEAT registry and a possible filtering-down effect that could see other businesses adopting similar stances, Apple could face challenges in increasing its share of the PC market among enterprise and government clients.

With Apple announcing its new Passbook digital wallet app for iOS 6 last month, speculation regarding the inclusion of near field communications (NFC) and mobile payment capabilities for future iOS devices has begun to increase. The speculation comes amid rumors of iPhone prototypes with NFC, although Apple has been said to be intentionally moving slowly on the mobile payment front.

Now that Passbook has been revealed, today's granting of a new Apple patent for NFC-enabled transportation ticketing takes on additional significance. As noted by Unwired View, the disclosed "iTravel" application would handle a broad array of functions to assist with travel logistics.

The main focus of the patent is how you would use your next iPhone with NFC chip at the airport check-in. It includes loading your ID info such as picture, retinal scan and fingerprint data from modern passports with embedded radio frequency identification tags. Collecting your ticket information from reservation confirmation e-mails/notifications, or extracting reservation images via optical character recognition software, barcode-reading software, or QR-code-reading software. Providing the necessary information at the NFC equipped check-in counter, and receiving the boarding pass with luggage info in exchange. Using the stored ID to pass through airport security, etc.

Apple's iTravel patent application has been known for some time, having been filed in September 2008 and published for public viewing in April 2010. But with the patent now having been granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Apple has broader protections should it choose to launch such an application.

It is unusual for Apple to so thoroughly document an actual iOS application concept that has yet to see the light of day in a patent application, and it is unclear exactly why Apple has chosen to do so. But with NFC technology being a bit slower to establish itself than originally hoped, perhaps Apple thought it would be able to move faster on its idea. Alternatively, Apple may have already discarded this specific implementation, but with Passbook making an appearance later this year and NFC perhaps also being included, Apple's iTravel concept may still find its way into iOS devices in some form.