MacRumors

Apple today published a Report on Government Information Requests [PDF], outlining statistics on government and law enforcement requests it has received seeking information about individual users or devices from January to the end of June.

We believe that our customers have a right to understand how their personal information is handled, and we consider it our responsibility to provide them with the best privacy protections available. Apple has prepared this report on the requests we receive from governments seeking information about individual users or devices in the interest of transparency for our customers around the world.

In the report, Apple specifies that it has "no interest in collecting customer data" and details the number of law enforcement requests that it has received, the number of accounts specified within the requests, the number of accounts that Apple supplied data for, and the number of requests Apple objected to.

According to the data, Apple received 3,542 device information requests, for 8,605 devices. Apple provided data for 88 percent or 3,110 of those requests. The company also received between 1,000 and 2,000 requests for account information for 2,000 to 3,000 accounts, but is unable to disclose the information that it provided. Apple also provided information for law enforcement agencies in a number of other countries.

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Apple's new iPad Air marks a significant technological step forward for the company, improving performance while reducing the device's volume and weight by over 25%. Much of the size and weight savings have been enabled by improved power efficiency, allowing Apple to reduce the device's battery thickness and capacity by roughly the same 25%.

As noted in IHS iSuppli's component cost analysis released earlier today, the iPad Air now uses just 36 LEDs to light its display, down from as many as 84 in previous generations. Apple has also reduced the thickness of the display assembly, and so it appears that the display is indeed one of the areas where Apple has been able to make the most improvement on size and weight, both in the components themselves and in the battery capacity needed to drive them.

In a new analysis comparing the iPad Air's display to that of the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 and the Google Nexus 10, Ray Soneira of DisplayMate Technologies confirms that Apple has indeed changed display technologies in the iPad Air, moving to indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) semiconductor materials from the amorphous silicon (a-Si) compounds used in previous iPads. While rumors of Apple moving to IGZO for the iPad and other products have circulated for several years, Sharp has experienced difficulties ramping up production and it has taken until now for Apple to bring the technology to its products.

Among the evidence cited by Soneira for his claim that the iPad Air has moved to IGZO technology are power measurements showing that the iPad Air's display offers a 57% improvement in power efficiency compared to previous iPads, a jump that simply would not be possible with a-Si technology. IGZO offers significantly better electron mobility than a-Si, allowing for much lower power requirements. The shift in technology has also enabled other improvements in the display of the iPad Air compared to its predecessor, and Soneira notes that Apple continues to offer an excellent display on its tablet lineup.

Compared to the 4th generation, the screen Reflectance decreased by 23 percent, the Peak Brightness increased by 7 percent, and the Contrast Rating for High Ambient Light increased by 32 percent – all good. Absolute Color Accuracy and Image Contrast fidelity are very good (but somewhat below the Kindle Fire) and are discussed in detail below. The emphasis for the iPad Air is in reduced size, thickness, and weight. The most important under the hood display improvement is the switch from a-Si amorphous Silicon LCDs up to a much higher performance IGZO LCD backplane, which was discussed in our iPad 3 Display Shoot-Out article last year. The switch to IGZO produces an impressive 57 percent improvement in display power efficiency from previous Retina Display iPads – so the iPad Air doesn’t get uncomfortably warm like the earlier iPads.

MacRumors spoke with Soneira about the state of the display industry and Apple's potential plans for the future, and Soneira noted that he expects the Retina iPad mini launching later this month to also adopt IGZO technology. If anything, a move to IGZO is more important on the iPad mini than on the iPad Air due to higher pixel density on the smaller device, with a-Si being infeasible for a Retina display at that size.

While the iPad Air's display is excellent, Soneira notes Apple is no longer at the top of the heap, with Amazon's Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 display actually performing better than the iPad Air's display. This is made possible by Amazon's use of low temperature polysilicon (LTPS) technology, which offers even better performance and lower power requirements than IGZO.

LTPS is commonly used on displays for smaller devices such as the iPhone, but Amazon has pushed the technology to the edge by bringing it to tablet-sized displays despite high costs and complicated production. Apple is unlikely to follow Amazon's lead in the near future, in large part due to scalability issues that simply won't support the tens of millions of tablets Apple is producing each year.

IGZO also offers a more natural transition for display manufacturers, as they can in many cases simply upgrade their existing equipment from current a-Si production, while moving to LTPS would require a complete change in production. IGZO is also just the first of a number of metal oxide semiconductors that show promise for improved display performance, pointing to solid opportunities for the technology to continue to evolve.

Overall, Soneira notes that the iPad Air display has seen a very solid incremental upgrade, although he does have a few quibbles such as the continued presence of an air gap between the display and the cover glass when Apple has been moving toward laminating the two components together in other products. And with Amazon able to pursue LTPS technology for the Kindle Fire HDX due to its smaller size and lower unit volumes, Apple is finding itself facing stiffer competition in displays where it has long been the industry leader.

Yesterday, the State of Arizona and GT Advanced announced that Apple is building a new 700-employee factory in Arizona to make sapphire glass. Apple will contract with GT Advanced, with that company owning and operating furnaces and related equipment at the facility.

Back in April, Pocketnow went to GT Advanced's factory in Massachusetts to find out how sapphire displays are made. It's likely that the facility in Arizona will use a similar process, though we do not yet know what Apple will use the sapphire for. A safe bet would be the company's rumored smart watch product -- many luxury watches use sapphire glass because of its durability.

The process is relatively straightforward: a sapphire seed, about the size and shape of a hockey puck, is placed at the bottom of a single-use molybdenum barrel called a crucible. The crucible is then filled with a mixture of condensed corundum -a crystalline form of aluminum oxide- and a material called “crackle,” sapphire material left over from previous runs. The full crucible is then placed inside the furnace, where it sits atop the “finger,” a small liquid helium-cooled platform that prevents the sapphire seed from melting too early. The furnace is sealed, the air is evacuated, and the temperature is brought up to 2100 degrees Celsius to allow the materials to melt together. (The video says 2200, but that’s wrong. It’s 2100, for all you making-sapphire-at-home hobbyists.) The material is put through a series of cooling cycles over the next 16 or 17 days, during which time the sapphire slowly crystallizes from bottom to top. The end result is this: a 115kg cylindrical section of industrial sapphire called a “boule.”

The new factory is expected to use next generation, large capacity furnaces with an emphasis on lower cost, higher volume sapphire glass manufacturing.

Apple currently uses small pieces of sapphire glass -- which provides superior durability and scratch resistance to other forms of glass -- to protect the cameras on the iPhone and on the home button for the new Touch ID-equipped iPhone 5s. A report from earlier this year suggested that future smartphones may use sapphire, a crystalline form of aluminum oxide, instead of more traditional forms of glass.

While Apple's new Mac Pro doesn't launch until next month, the machine continues to occasionally surface in the results database for the popular Geekbench benchmarking tool. The first appearance came in June just after the redesigned Mac Pro was teased at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, with that machine running the high-end 12-core 2.7 GHz Xeon E5-2697 v2 from Intel's Ivy Bridge-E family. And in late September, a second entry appeared sharing details on a Mac Pro running the 8-core 3.0 GHz Xeon E5-1680 v2 chip.

A third Mac Pro entry has now shown up in the Geekbench results database, revealing the 6-core 3.5 GHz Xeon E5-1650 v2 chip that will also be an option in the new Mac Pro. As with the previously seen machines, this new Mac Pro is running a custom version of OS X Mavericks, build 13A4023. The machine's appearance leaves only the entry-level quad-core 3.7 GHz Xeon E5-1620 v2 yet unseen in early benchmarks.

While both the 6-core and 8-core machines were tested using Geekbench 3.1.2 in 32-bit mode, which allows for direct comparison of their benchmarks, the 12-core Mac Pro was tested using Geekbench 2.4.3, which used a different baseline and means that scores can not be directly compared. But between the 6-core and 8-core machines, the two unsurprisingly show similar single-core scores of around 3300 in Geekbench 3, while the newly surfaced 6-core machine sees a lower multi-core score of 18309 compared to the 24429 seen on the 8-core version.

The new 8-core Mac Pro had previously shown benchmark scores essentially on par with that of the highest-end 12-core Mac Pro models from 2010 and 2012, and while this new 6-core machine unsurprisingly falls short of that level, it does still easily top the fastest 8-core machine seen in the 2009 and 2010 models.

New Intel Xeon processors are certainly not the only horsepower improvements included in the new Mac Pro, as all machines will come standard with dual AMD FirePro graphics chips. And with the Mac Pro able to tap into those chips for general computation tasks via OpenCL, users will see significant improvements in real-world performance.

Apple's new Mac Pro launches in December, but the company has yet to announce a specific date in the month when it will become available.

IHS Suppli has released its estimate of the component costs involved in building the new iPad Air, performing a virtual teardown based on information revealed by Apple and industry knowledge. According to IHS estimates, the component cost of the iPad Air is between $274 and $361 depending on the model, with the base model's components actually totaling $42 less than that of the entry-level third generation iPad last year despite significant technology improvements to reduce size and weight while improving performance. IHS iSuppli did not perform a cost analysis on the fourth-generation iPad, which was released in late 2012.

The estimates from IHS iSuppli cover only the cost of the various components that make up the device and do not include other costs involved in product development, manufacturing, and sales, such as research and development, software, patent licenses, marketing, and distribution expenditures. The full report has not yet been released but AllThingsD received early access.

The bill of materials includes $90 for the display, $43 for the touchscreen components, $18 for the A7 chip manufactured by Samsung, between $9 and $60 for the Toshiba-made flash memory chips, $10 for the DRAM chips manufactured by Elpida, and $32 for the cellular data network chips made by Qualcomm for the LTE-ready versions of the iPad Air.

IHS analyst Andrew Rassweiler also points to the iPad Air's advances when it comes to supporting various LTE frequencies:

With the iPad Air, Apple appears to have reached a new milestone on the wireless front: It can support every LTE frequency with a single combination of chips. “This is something Apple tried to do with the iPhone 5S and 5C, but it couldn’t quite get there,” Rassweiler says. “One single model of the iPad Air is able to work with all US wireless carriers.”

IHS iSuppli reported last month that iPhone 5s component costs were estimated to begin at $199, with the cheaper iPhone 5c's costs estimated to be starting at $173. The iPad Air was released last Friday with adoption rates reportedly outpacing last year's iPad 4 and iPad mini launches, although Apple has yet to release official sales numbers for the device's opening weekend.

The full IHS Suppli report should be released tomorrow.

First announced at Apple's September 10 media event alongside the iPhone 5s and its M7 motion coprocessor, the Nike+ Move app has launched in the App Store, allowing iPhone 5s users to get enhanced statistics daily about their physical activity.

The new app was the first introduced to take advantage of the M7 coprocessor and new CoreMotion APIs in iOS 7, allowing it to track more reliable and accurate movement data in the background, even when the phone is asleep, while also conserving battery life. The app then takes all the movement data it gathers and converts it into NikeFuel, the fitness company's measuring unit for physical activities, and uses it to motivate a user to keep exercising.

Nike+ Move offers insight into when you move, how you move and where you move - and lets you challenge your friends to see who moves more.

-Win the day by beating your NikeFuel average and watch your goal ring change from Red to Green.
- See when you are most active throughout the day and how you’re doing compared to yesterday.
- Move more often and win as many hours as you can throughout the day.
- See how you moved through the day with a breakdown of running, walking, and other movement.
- See where you're moving and where you move the most each day.
- Check out how you compare against your Game Center friends or other Nike+ Move users near you.

While Nike+ Move isn't the first app to integrate the M7 coprocessor, it is the highest profile app to take advantage of the new processor onboard the iPhone 5s. Apple is planning to take advantage of the M7 in future software updates by leveraging it to improve iPhones' mapping and location services.

Nike+ Move is available only for the iPhone 5s in the App Store for free. [Direct Link]

Apple will build a new 700-employee manufacturing facility in Mesa, Arizona, to make sapphire glass, according to releases from the State of Arizona and GT Advanced, a New Hampshire-based materials manufacturing company. Apple purchased the vacant manufacturing building from First Solar, and has contracted with GT Advanced to "own and operate furnaces and related equipment" at the facility.

The State of Arizona reports [PDF] that the plant will create at least 700 jobs in the first year, plus an additional 1,300 construction-related jobs. Apple will also be investing in new renewable energy projects to power the new facility.

Apple provided a statement to Pocket-Lint confirming the facility:

We are proud to expand our domestic manufacturing initiative with a new facility in Arizona, creating more than 2,000 jobs in engineering, manufacturing and construction. This new plant will make components for Apple products and it will run on 100% renewable energy from day one, as a result of the work we are doing with SRP to create green energy sources to power the facility.

Apple uses small pieces of sapphire glass -- which provides superior durability and scratch resistance to other forms of glass -- to protect the cameras on the iPhone and on the home button for the new Touch ID-equipped iPhone 5s, however this would seem to be an expansion of Apple's sapphire glass efforts. A report from earlier this year suggested that future smartphones may use sapphire, a crystalline form of aluminum oxide, instead of more traditional forms of glass.

Other reports have suggested that Apple has experimented with sapphire displays but found them infeasible. Additionally, Corning has claimed its Gorilla Glass 3 is a better glass solution than sapphire.

One possible destination for Apple's new sapphire glass production is in a potential smart watch project. Sapphire is already extensively used in high-end watchmaking and could be more feasible on a small screen than the larger display on a smartphone or tablet.

The move is a major expansion of Apple's own production efforts -- in recent years, Apple has exclusively contracted with third parties to build and supply components for its products. Many pundits have speculated that Apple would begin using its $150 billion cash pile to grow its manufacturing efforts.

The new plant is also noteworthy because it is in the United States. Apple will assemble its first computer in years in the United States at a Flextronics plant in Austin, Texas. Apple is prominently featuring the Mac Pro's manufacturing location in product videos and in the press.