MacRumors

AT&T today announced new smartphone data plans with larger data allocations, the first update to AT&T's plans since June of 2010. The plans kick in this Sunday, January 22.

"Customers are using more data than ever before," said David Christopher, chief marketing officer, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets. "Our new plans are driven by this increasing demand in a highly competitive environment, and continue to deliver a great value to customers, especially as we continue our 4G LTE deployment."

The smartphone plans include unlimited access to AT&T Wi-Fi Hotspots, and replace the current $15/$25 data plans:

- AT&T DataPlus 300MB: $20 for 300MB, additional 300MB for $20.
- AT&T DataPro 3GB: $30 for 3GB, additional 1GB for $10/each
- AT&T DataPro 5GB: $50 for 5GB, with mobile hotspot/tethering, additional 1GB for $10/each

iPad 3G users can now choose from one of three plans:

- The existing 250MB for $15 plan
- AT&T DataConnect 3GB: $30 for 3GB
- AT&T DataConnect 5GB: $50 for 5GB

Current users can keep their plans, but as of Sunday, all new smartphone and tablet service contracts will have to use one of these plans.

AppleInsider reports that it received a tip earlier this week claiming that Apple's digital textbook project rumored for unveiling tomorrow has been developed internally under the code name "Bliss". The source also indicated that the project was inspired by Apple board member Al Gore's Our Choice e-book app focused on global climate change.

Al Gore's Our Choice app

The person who contacted AppleInsider indicated that Apple's Internet software chief, Eddy Cue, is responsible for the distribution side of the new e-textbook initiative. But Rosner is said to be in charge of development of the editor used to create digital textbooks, as well as the reading software that will allow students and teachers to view the files.

The person said the internal code-name for the project is "Bliss," and said the software will allow publishers to make textbooks more interactive.

Our Choice, which was selected for an Apple Design Award at last year's Worldwide Developers Conference, is an immersive, interactive app produced by Push Pop Press. The firm founded by former Apple engineers had planned to expand its efforts in the interactive book-as-app market with additional titles, but the plan was cut short when Facebook acquired the company last year.

In the past 5 years, Apple's push into the enterprise has been led by the iPhone and the iPad. Corporate IT departments, long dominated by the BlackBerry, are becoming more receptive to iOS products, especially when users are given the choice about which platform to use.

In addition to iOS driving up Apple's sales -- accounting for some two-thirds of Apple's revenue in fact -- iOS's corporate success is driving enterprise adoption of the Mac. The Wall Street Journal writes of Apple's growing success in getting the Mac onto the desks of corporate employees. GE has more than 1,000 Mac users under a year-long pilot project that allows employees to choose to use Macs instead of PC's, without any significant knowledge of the program inside GE. The company has 330,000 computers, the vast majority running Windows.

GE started offering its employees the iPhone as an alternative to BlackBerrys in 2008. Now, it says about 10,000 GE employees carry the Apple smartphone, compared with 50,000 using BlackBerrys.

The Fairfield, Conn., conglomerate hasn't trumpeted the Apple option for computers and laptops internally, and as a result employee awareness is limited.

But staffers across GE businesses are eligible as long as there aren't security clearance issues, such as devices for defense work, or big compatibility problems with needed software.

"All businesses are participating at some level in making this [option] available to their employees," said Greg Simpson, GE's chief technology officer.

"To find out that we support Apple, we support iPhones, we support Macs, it does take away one question for people, 'Are they a contemporary company or not?'" Mr. Simpson said. "I think that is a recruiting-positive thing."

Forrester Research estimates that Apple will sell $9 billion in Macs and $10 billion in iPads to corporations this year, up 50% from 2011. Forrester anticipates spending on PCs and tablets made by other companies will decline by 3% to $69 billion.

Bits and pieces of Apple's announcement plans for its education-focused media event to be held tomorrow are continuing to flow in, and Bloomberg now weighs in with its sources indicating that the company's new publishing tools will have a strong focus on shaking up the kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) textbook market.

At an event in New York tomorrow, Apple will announce a set of tools that make it easier to publish interactive textbooks and other digital educational content, said two people with knowledge of the announcement, who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

The plans, to be unveiled by Apple Internet software chief Eddy Cue, are aimed at broadening the educational materials available for the iPad, especially for students in kindergarten to 12th grade, the people said. By setting its sights on the $10 billion-a-year textbook industry, Apple is using the tablet to encourage students to shun costly tomes that weigh down backpacks in favor of less-expensive, interactive digital books that can be updated anywhere via the Web.

Echoing some of what was covered in an Ars Technica report earlier this week, Bloomberg's sources claim that Apple's announcements will include support for a new ePub standard and tools to make it easier for both large publishers and self-publishers to bring their content to the iPad.

Apple’s new software is designed for a broad range of authors to be able to publish the content in a digital format, similar to what Amazon.com Inc. does with its direct publishing tools, said the people. Large publishers will be able to create digital versions of textbooks, with embedded graphics and video.

Apple also wants to empower “self-publishers” to create new kinds of teaching tools, said the people. Teachers could use it to design materials for that week’s lesson. Scientists, historians and other authors could publish professional-looking content without a deal with a publisher.

Apple's media event is scheduled to kick off at 10:00 AM Eastern / 7:00 AM Pacific tomorrow, with Eddy Cue and Roger Rosner expected to play prominent roles in the presentation.

Fortune publishes a lengthy excerpt from Adam Lashinsky's forthcoming book, Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired -- and Secretive -- Company Really Works, highlighting the company's famous secrecy and how its organizational structure and policies foster that security.

Those readers interested in reading the book from cover to cover when it debuts next week may want to avoid the excerpt, but for others the piece is an interesting look into how Apple keeps its employees on a need-to-know basis with a patchwork of clearances to ensure that very few know the company's full plans for a given project.

Secrecy takes two basic forms at Apple -- external and internal. There is the obvious kind, the secrecy that Apple uses as a way of keeping its products and practices hidden from competitors and the rest of the outside world. This cloaking device is the easier of the two types for the rank and file to understand because many companies try to keep their innovations under wraps. Internal secrecy, as evidenced by those mysterious walls and off-limits areas, is tougher to stomach. Yet the link between secrecy and productivity is one way that Apple (AAPL) challenges long-held management truths and the notion of transparency as a corporate virtue.

The excerpt discusses Apple's command and control structure in which there is reportedly relatively little political maneuvering, with the company's "unwritten caste system" placing Jonathan Ive's industrial design team among the "untouchable" and the status of many other teams fluctuating relative to the prominence of the products they are working on.

Inside Apple debuts on January 25 and will be available from retailers such as Amazon (hardcover, Kindle e-book, and CD audiobook) and Apple's iBookstore [iTunes Store].

According to the Wall Street Journal, Roger Rosner is the executive in charge of Apple's digital textbook tools. According to his LinkedIn page, Rosner is a Vice President for Productivity Applications at Apple, and has been with the company since 2001, prior to which he was CEO of Bluefish Labs, a software development firm that Apple purchased.

Prior to working on the textbook service, Rosner was in charge of Pages, Numbers and Keynote -- Apple's iWork suite of office applications. Jessica Vascellaro writes for the WSJ:

Mr. Rosner's involvement is a sign of how strongly Apple intends to emphasize textbook creation, in a move to change the type of educational content that exists on the market. It also underscores how as textbooks—and all media—goes digital, it is increasingly important for tech companies to get media companies to create digital content with their software or in formats compatible with their services and devices.

Whether Mr. Rosner, whose LinkedIn profile pegs him at Apple for more than a decade, will take the stage on Thursday remains unclear. If so, audiences may remember him from Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference this past June, where he demonstrated features of iCloud, the company's online syncing and storing service.

Rosner made his first widely-viewed public appearance when he demonstrated iCloud onstage at WWDC in June of 2011.

Since at least 2004, Apple has offered a rebate program that has typically offered users a $100 rebate when they purchase a new Mac and an eligible printer directly from Apple. The program was typically offered as a three-month program that was consistently renewed upon expiration, although in recent years the company shifted toward a perpetual program while reserving the right to discontinue it at any time.

It now appears that Apple has discontinued the program entirely, as retail sources have indicated to both MacRumors and 9to5Mac that Apple has ended the program as of today. From a notice to staff members:

Printer Rebates Ending on January 17

Effective Tuesday, January 17, the printer rebate will no longer be offered.

Monday, January 16 will be the last day customers can get a rebate on a qualifying printer when purchased with a Mac. Customers will have 90 days from the date of purchase to submit rebate claims. An additional 30 days will be given to correct invalid claims.

The Apple Retail Store and the Apple Online Store will continue to sell printers, albeit without a rebate offer.

U.S. and CA only: Wednesday, May 16 is the last day the online Apple Rebate Tool will be available to submit rebates. Customers should submit their claims according to the terms of the promotion.

Apple previously offered a number of rebate programs on various products, but with the discontinuation of the printer rebate program, it appears that the company has eliminated rebates entirely. iWork and MobileMe rebates disappeared in April 2011, and the company had previously offered rebates on the products such as Mac OS X and iLife combination purchases, Mac OS and Microsoft Office combination purchases, and others. Apple previous Back to School rebate program has also been replaced with an iTunes Store/Mac App Store gift card.

Apple continues to offer several printers as optional add-ons when configuring a new Mac in the online store, specifically promoting AirPrint-compatible models, but the printers are being offered at regular retail prices with no promotional rebates or other discounts.

AllThingsD reports on new research from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) analyzing the impact of the secondary market for the iPhone, the portion of used iPhones that are resold or given away when users upgrade to the latest models. The survey looked at customers purchasing new iPhones beginning with the iPhone 4S launch last October, finding that 53% of those users had returned their old phones to the secondary market.

Of those old phones being put back onto the secondary market, the survey found that 49% were older iPhones, while 21% were BlackBerry smartphones and 15% were Android devices. Approximately two-thirds of those devices returned to the market were given away, with the remaining third having been sold.

Breakdown of old devices reentering secondary market following new iPhone purchases

The research firm believes that, for every used iPhone that carriers activate, they save around $400. In the fourth quarter of 2011 alone, CIRP figures that secondary-market activations saved AT&T and Verizon between $400 million and $800 million in subsidy costs.

And while the strong market for used iPhones may seem like a detriment to Apple given that those users may be purchasing a used device offering no revenue for Apple rather than a new one, CIRP suggests that those low-priced used handsets are a common way to introduce new users to the iPhone ecosystem. That introduction then sets the users up for future purchases of new iPhones and other Apple products.

“It hurts Apple because it creates competition for new iPhones, which we see in the relatively modest sales of reduced-price iPhone 4 and free iPhone 3G units. But it also benefits the company because used iPhone customers aspire to own the newest and best iPhone, so they are likely future new phone customers. In fact, they are likely new entrants to the Apple ecosystem, who otherwise would not have found a way in.”

Beyond future hardware sales, the used iPhone market also increases the user base and market for apps and other iTunes Store content, with the device's able to serve more good than if they had been discarded or forgotten in a drawer.

Apple's education-focused media event isn't until Thursday, but Japanese blog Mac Otakara reports that Apple is already making plans for an early February event to introduce the iPad 3 ahead of an early March launch. The event is said to potentially also feature iOS 5.1, which is currently in developer testing.

According to asian supplier and a source in United States, Apple seems to prepare to hold Special Event in early February.

Because Chinese factory will be in holiday of New Year, then new product is concidered to be released in early March.

An approximately one-month gap between introduction and availability would be significantly longer than for the iPad 2, which was introduced on March 2, 2011 with availability coming just nine days later on March 11.

The original iPad didn't launch until more than two months after its January 2010 debut, although Apple tends toward longer gaps between introduction and launch for new product categories in order to accommodate the regulatory approval process without risking leaks of product details.

Mac Otakara has had a mixed track record in the past, but the site's most recent report regarding the start of iPad 3 production ahead of an early March debut was corroborated by Bloomberg just a few days later.

The question of whether Apple will continue to offer the existing iPad 2 as a lower-cost option alongside the forthcoming iPad 3 has been the subject of a fair amount of rumor and speculation, but if new display panel shipment plans provided to Digitimes are correct, it appears that the iPad 2 will indeed live on.

According to the report, production of the "Retina" resolution iPad 3 display panels at 2048x1536 pixels will surpass that of the lower-resolution 1024x768 iPad 2 panels by the second quarter of this year, but Apple's suppliers will still push out approximately 25 million iPad 2 panels in 2012. That will be down from an estimated 48 million panels in 2011, but still a substantial number. Sources suggest that Apple's suppliers will also be pushing out approximately 40 million iPad 3 panels this year for a total of 65 million iPads between the two models.

With fewer than one million panels shipped in the fourth quarter of 2011, Apple will keep increasing the shipment volume of panels for use in the new version of iPad to 6.0-7.0 million panels in the first quarter and 10.0 million units in the third quarter of 2012, the sources pointed out.

In the meantime, Apple has downwardly adjusted shipments of iPad 2 panels from the peak of 16.0 million panels in the third quarter to 10.0 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011 and further to 7.0-8.0 million units in the first quarter of 2012, the sources indicated. Thus, the shipment volume of panels for use in the new version of iPad will surpass that of iPad 2 panels in the second quarter of 2012, the sources noted.

Digitimes has had a spotty record regarding Apple's product plans, but it does sometimes offer at least reasonably accurate information on production volumes from the company's supply chain. Consequently, it does seem likely that any volume of iPad 2 display panels approaching the rumored number would be indicative of continued iPad 2 production well beyond the introduction of the iPad 3.

Several reports have indicated that the iPad 2 will carry on at a lower entry price of $399 or perhaps even lower, a move rumored to be planned in part to counter Amazon's smaller Android-based Kindle Fire priced at $199. The iPad 3 is said to be set for a March debut and will reportedly offer LTE connectivity, a quad-core processor, and the high-resolution Retina display.

As we noted last September, Fortune's Adam Lashinsky has written a new book entitled Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired -- and Secretive -- Company Really Works, an unauthorized look at the inner workings of Apple. The book is due for release on January 25.

Fortune offers one tidbit from the book today, profiling Senior Vice President for iOS Software Scott Forstall as Apple's current "CEO-in-waiting". The book paints a similar picture to one offered by offered by BusinessWeek last October, portraying Forstall as an aggressively ambitious "mini-Steve".

He's young (43). Comfortable on stage (played Sweeney Todd in high school). Has serious nerd credentials (Stanford, NeXT). Shares Steve Jobs' obsession with detail (keeps a jeweler's loupe in his office to check every pixel on every icon). And the division he heads -- mobile software -- drives nearly 70% of Apple's (AAPL) income.

"He's a sharp, down-to-earth, and talented engineer, and a more-than-decent presenter," one entrepreneur told Adam Lashinsky. "He's the total package."

But Lashinsky also notes that Forstall's open ambition has ruffled a few feathers at Apple, reportedly stemming in part from efforts to consolidate his influence while Steve Jobs was on medical leave. Previous reports have suggested that Forstall's personality was at least partially responsible for "Godfather of the iPod" Tony Fadell leaving the company in 2010.

Tim Cook was awarded 1,000,000 restricted stock units in an effort to keep him in the role of Apple CEO until at least 2021. Roughly eight years Cook's junior, Forstall would be in a good position to succeed Cook at some point in the future should Apple be able to keep him within the senior executive team.

Inside Apple will be available from numerous retailers, including from Amazon as a hardcover book, Kindle e-book, and CD audiobook, and from Apple's iBookstore [iTunes Store].

Apple's education-focused media event is scheduled for this Thursday, and more details seem to be leaking out. Earlier this evening, the Wall Street Journal reported that McGraw-Hill has been working with Apple on this project since last June. Now, ArsTechnica claims that one of the key components of Thursday's announcement is a new publishing tool for eBooks.

The current state of software tools continues to frustrate authors and publishers alike, with several authors telling Ars that they wish Apple or some other vendor would make a simple app that makes the process as easy as creating a song in GarageBand.

Our sources say Apple will announce such a tool on Thursday.

Apple is said to be announcing support for the ePub 3 standard as well, and hopes to open the door for publishers to easily create interactive e-books. Steve Jobs is said to have been intimately involved with the project for several years.

Apple's media event is being held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City on Thursday, January 19. It is scheduled to begin at 10:00 AM Eastern / 7:00 AM Pacific, and Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue has been reported to be a key figure in the presentation.

Update: Fortune claims that the report by Ars Technica, specifically including information from Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis, was "seriously overhyped". In particular, Fortune's Philip Elmer-DeWitt takes exception to the claims that Apple will release a "GarageBand for e-books" to enable simple digital textbook creation, instead claiming that the reference was to a sample app that will be demoed by Apple as an example of what can be done on the platform.

MacInnis also mentioned GarageBand in our interview. But what he was describing was a sample iPad textbook, produced in-house and packed with pedological bells and whistles, that would serve as a reference design for textbook publishers, much in the way GarageBand for the iPad showed iOS developers what the new platform could do.

MacInnis does expect Apple to unveil new tools for creating iPad textbooks, along with a new content repository to make e-textbooks easily available to teachers. But the tools are not a "GarageBand for e-books." And according to MacInnis, they're designed to support the textbook industry, not to do an end-run around it.