According to 9to5Mac , during today's town hall meeting , Apple CEO Tim Cook announced to employees that they would get $500 off Macs and $250 iPads. The new discount program starts in June 2012, and can only be used once every 3 years. Employees also need to have been working at Apple for at least 90 days

Brazilian newspaper Folha reports [ Google translation ] that the Brazilian government has officially approved tax incentives that will allow Foxconn to begin producing iPads in the country. Interministerial Ordinance #34, signed on Monday and published in Brazil's official register today, specifically provides for a reduction in or exemption from certain taxes associated with the production of touchscreen tablet devices lacking a keyboard and weighing less than 750 grams.

According to a new report from Israeli business newspaper Calcalist ( via 9to5Mac ), Apple has begun hiring for its research and development center in Haifa, Israel with a goal of opening the center by the end of February. The report claims that Apple has already received "several hundred resumes" from engineers looking to work in the new center, which is being headed up by Apple's newly-hired Israeli high-tech executive Aharon Aharon . The report notes that is likely to set up its research center near existing facilities run by Intel, Microsoft, and Phillips, with Apple seeking expertise in chip development, specifically with electrical circuits and hardware testing and verification

Contrary to some reports , Apple CEO Tim Cook said today that the company hadn't seen any slowdown in iPad sales following the introduction of the much-hyped Kindle Fire tablet. When asked by an analyst during today's quarterly earnings call about the impact on the iPad from lower priced tablets, Cook noted that the company sold a record 15.4 million iPads and that Apple doesn't consider "limited function tablets and e-readers to be in the same category as the iPad". A big reason for the iPads success, Cook believes, is that the ecosystem for the iPad is "in a class by itself".

After today's record breaking results , Apple will be holding a company-wide Town Hall for employees discussing some "exciting new things going on at Apple." Tim Cook sent a company-wide email to employees, as posted by 9to5Mac : Thanks to everyone’s hard work, we’re off to a great start in 2012. Last week in New York we launched a groundbreaking initiative for education with iBooks textbooks, and today we reported the strongest quarter in Apple’s history.Please join me tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. in Town Hall

In his biography, Steve Jobs was so infuriated by Android's similarities to the iPhone that he swore to spend all the money Apple had in the bank to defeat the platform. Newsweek columnist Dan Lyons passes along a rumor that Apple has spent $100 million in legal fees on just its first set of claims against HTC. Who knows if it’s true, but if so, Apple didn’t get a lot for its money.

We've been following the development of Apple's first Dutch retail store for some time now , as issues over historic preservation have slowed the timetable for construction at the landmark Hirsch building in Amsterdam. But things now appear to be coming together as iPhoneclub.nl [ Google translation ] and One More Thing [ Google translation ] offer a number of details on plans for the store, which seems to be headed for a February 18 opening. According to reports, much of the store staff is currently in training at the Amsterdam Hilton, while Geniuses have been trained at a number of UK stores.

Sony today announced ( via Macworld UK ) the launch of new image sensor technology that the company expects will help improve performance and shrink the size of cameras on mobile devices by later this year. The new back-illuminated complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor utilizes a pixel section layered directly onto the sensor's circuitry, significantly reducing the sensor size from the previous design that utilized pixel and circuit sections side-by-side on a substrate layer.

AllThingsD reports on a new research note from Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry claiming that customers downloaded approximately 350,000 iBooks Textbooks from the iBookstore over the first three days of availability. That performance was accompanied by over 90,000 downloads of Apple's iBooks Author app from the Mac App Store. If those numbers are accurate, Apple’s textbook effort would seem to be off to a good start

AppleInsider claims that Apple is planning on incorporating support for the new faster 802.11ac Wi-Fi specification into products this year. The new 802.11ac standard achieves much faster wireless networking speeds than the existing 802.11n specification (in use on the latest Mac, AirPort and iOS devices) by using 2 to 4 times the frequency bandwidth (from 80 to 160MHz), more efficient data transfers through sophisticated modulation, and more antennas (up to 8; existing standards support up to 4, while Apple's Macs currently use up to 3). This "Gigabit WiFi" offers speeds 3 times as fast as existing 802.11n wireless networks can with speeds of over 1 Gigabit per second.