Demand is growing so fast, in fact, that it appears that its new $1 billion dollar data center in North Carolina and its recently-acquired 12 petabytes of server space aren’t enough to support Apple’s cloud division anymore…

Oregon Live is reporting that Apple is eying 160-acres worth of land in Prineville, Oregon, a small city that sits about 150 miles southeast of Portland, to build a new data center.

“The world’s largest tech company is nearing a decision on whether to build a large data center in Prineville, a quarter mile south of the Facebook server farm that opened earlier this year, according to two people with direct knowledge of Apple’s plans.”

 

As the article points out, there aren’t many incentives for a city to host large data centers. They don’t bring about many job opportunities, and eat fairly large amounts of electricity. Apple estimates its data center would need around 31-megawatts of power, which is enough to power nearly 22,000 houses.

But the company’s land ownership and large building would mean Prineville would see a significant boost in tax collections. And the data center would provide a few hundred short-term jobs during its construction. So, there certainly are some upsides.

According to the source, Apple has until the end of the month to decide whether or not it wants to proceed and purchase the land.

[9to5Mac]

Currently, Apple’s staff use MacBook Pros to help diagnose issues and then work to rectify them, but it would appear that the company will now begin using iPads running custom software.

The change sees Apple replace its own premium notebooks with tablets, offering increased portability to the technical customer service process…

Apple’s MacBook Pros currently run a piece of software called GCRM, and it is expected that the new iPad system will also run a similar piece of software allowing Geniuses to check the current warranty state for Apple products, check them in for repair, and check the entire history of Apple products using their unique serial number.

One of the advantages of moving from MacBook Pros to iPads is the increased portability offered by the tablets. Currently, Geniuses are tethered to the Genius Bar, often creating a bottleneck for customer traffic. With an iPad in tow, staff will be able to move around the store, offering help anywhere without the need to be behind a desk.

Anything that makes the customer flow in Apple Stores a more pleasurable experience gets our vote, and Apple is showing great faith in its iPad with this move.

If Apple isn’t going to be using its own notebooks anymore, it may just show where the company’s priorities lie moving forward.