July 06 - 02:35pm EDT   Apple appears to be expanding its retail store presence into Modesto, CA, as both Apple and Monster.com have listings for at least 11 positions in the Central-Valley city. The new store would be located at Modesto's Vintage Faire Mall, the report claims. Advertised positions include store manager, assistant store manager, genius, cashier, inventory specialist and others. Although has not yet confirmed the store, the Modesto location would be the 41st Apple retail store in California. [full story]

July 04 - 12:15pm EDT   At its current stage of development, the Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard beta is not outperforming 10.5 Leopard by any wide stretches, as developers dive into the new OS with GeekBench. The Netherlands' Mac Zone writes that benchmarking numbers indicate that 10.6 performs better than 10.5, but only by a small margin. This hardly is conclusive of the final product, however, given that 10.6 Snow Leopard is still under early development – early betas of 10.5 Leopard had a very Tiger-like interface and poorer performance than the final build. [full story]

July 04 - 11:05am EDT   HTC has been a veteran of smartphones but has only just recently ventured into handheld computers, and the Shift represents its first full-fledged attempt at an ultra-mobile PC. The system promises to take all of HTC's experience with handsets and translate it into a full-fledged Windows computer that happens to have the conveniences of a cellphone; but its real challenges may be both to compete with a new wave of notebooks as well as extra-capable cellphones like iPhone 3G. Click through for a full review of HTC's inaugural device. [full story]

July 04 - 10:55am EDT   ASUS today announced the pricing of and more information on its new Eee PC 904 mini notebook, which it revealed just earlier this week. The new mini laptop PC will act as another offering in its Eee PC range, as opposed to replacing one of the existing products, like previously rumored. It will be the lowest-priced Eee PC in the range with a 9-inch screen, thanks to a combination of its chassis, screen size and hardware specs. [full story]

July 03 - 10:25pm EDT   Power Mac G5 and Mac Pro gamers have a new high-performance disk system available to them, through HighPoint Technologies' RocketRAID 2640x4, a 4x PCI-E SAS hard drive RAID system. The system offers users 56-percent increased performance over 10,000 RPM SATA drives, with 128MB per-second transfer speeds, offering users lower average latency and lower read/write seek times. The RocketRAID 2640x4 sells for $165 from HighPoint's website. [full story]

July 03 - 04:10pm EDT   HP today became one of the first companies known to be shipping systems based on AMD's new Turion X2 Ultra processors and platform. The 14-inch Compaq 6535b and 15.4-inch Compaq 6735b are HP's flagships for workstations and pros and use the new architecture to support up to 8GB of DDR2 memory (with 64-bit operating systems) as well as give faster integrated graphics through the Mobility Radeon HD 3200. [full story]

July 03 - 02:50pm EDT   NVIDIA will soon cut prices for its GeForce GTX cards despite releasing the hardware less than three weeks ago, the company confirmed today. Although unwilling to provide specific details, company spokesmen Bryan Del Rizzo and Ken Brown say the company is "adjusting the prices" for the GTX 260 and 280 downwards from their respective $400 and $650 markers and should be more affordable by next week. The costs will vary by card manufacturer, many of whom produce overclocked or otherwise non-reference versions. [full story]

July 03 - 01:05pm EDT   Intel gained momentum in the first quarter of 2008, but rival AMD continued to increase marketshare year-over-year, figures from iSuppli show. Intel gained 1.2 percent to reach 79.7 percent of global microprocessor revenue in the first quarter, but was down 0.7 percent from the first quarter of 2007. AMD lost share in between Q4 2007 and Q1 2008, moving from 14.1 percent to 13 percent, but this was still a 2.2 percent increase from the Q1 2007 period. [full story]

July 03 - 12:55pm EDT   Forum roundup: With the debut of the new iPhone just days away a poll was started in the MacNN forums to determine how many people are getting the new iPhone within the first week of its release. Earlier this week, users began discussing the new Mac OS X 10.5.4 software update, which is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility and security. [full story]

July 03 - 12:45pm EDT   The European Composer and Songwriter Alliance has come out against proposed changes to how online music royalties are collected, writes the Associated Press. The conflict stems from an ongoing investigation by the European Commission, aimed at addressing antitrust concerns relating to the lack of Europe-wide royalty schemes. The Commission notes that currently, national copyright agencies have effective monopolies in their respective regions; there is also a need to negotiate as many as 27 separate royalty schemes for an album, something which may be hampering the spread of European music. [full story]