New aerial images of Apple's planned NC fuel cell, solar farms emerge

Pictures of the area surrounding Apple's iCloud datacenter in Maiden, North Carolina show that progress is being made in preparing land for the company's future biogas and solar farm energy arrays. The images, captured by Wired in March and posted on Friday, show a large swath of cleared ground in front of Apple's datacenter that will presumably house the Bloom Energy fuel cells as well as 100 acres of freshly razed land that is expected to be used for a solar farm. Apple will employ 24 Bloom Energy Servers using natural gas supplied by Piedmont Natural Gas and a 20-megawatt solar installation to power its massive $1 billion datacenter. Once...

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Apple interested in wireless power to charge devices on store shelves

Apple has shown interest in wirelessly powering and charging its portable devices, allowing products like the iPhone and iPad to be powered up while sealed in packaging and on display at a retail store. The concept was detailed this week in a new patent application discovered by AppleInsider entitled "Active Electronic Media Packaging." It describes an active packaging system that would supply power and data to devices, allowing them to display content and show off features to customers while on display in a store. The proposed invention aims to replace the typical labels and other advertising that is found on the outside of product packaging....

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Biographer says Steve Jobs was legitimately infuriated by Android

Biographer Walter Isaacson has disputed Google CEO Larry Page's assertion that Steve Jobs only said disparaging remarks about its Android mobile operating system to rally his own employees. Page's comments came from an interview this week in which he said he believed Jobs's hatred of Android was merely "for show." The Google CEO suggested that the comments from Jobs served the best interests of Apple in giving its employees something to fight against. Those comments were in contrast to what Jobs told Isaacson for his biography of the Apple co-founder. In their conversations, Jobs called Android a "stolen product," and vowed to use his "last...

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