A federal jury in San Diego returned its verdict on September 25, 2026, the ninth day of trial in Taction Technology, Inc. v. Apple Inc., No. 3:21-cv-00812, before Judge Todd W. Robinson of the Southern District of California. The jury found that Apple infringed three claims of two Taction haptics patents and awarded $5,721,961,750. It found the infringement was not willful.

What the jury found

The verdict form asked four questions. On infringement, the jury answered yes for claims 17 and 19 of U.S. Patent 10,659,885 and for claim 16 of U.S. Patent 10,820,117. On willfulness, it answered no for both patents. On invalidity, which Apple had to prove by clear and convincing evidence, the court's minute entry records the verdict for Taction. On damages, the jury wrote in $5,721,961,750 as the amount adequate to compensate Taction for Apple's infringement. The form does not break that figure down by patent, product, or time period. The minute entry notes that seven jurors were present and that the jury was not polled.

The patents and the accused products

Both patents are titled Systems and Methods for Generating Damped Electromagnetically Actuated Planar Motion for Audio-Frequency Vibrations. They name Silmon James Biggs as the inventor, share a specification, and claim priority to a provisional application filed September 24, 2014. The '885 patent issued May 19, 2020, and the '117 patent issued October 27, 2020. The Federal Circuit described them as relating to tactile transducers that produce bass frequency vibrations for perception by touch.

Claim 17 of the '885 patent covers an apparatus for imparting motion to the skin of a user. It has a housing or frame, a conductive coil, a plurality of magnets near the coil, a moving portion made up of an inertial mass and the magnets, and a suspension of flexures that guides the moving portion in planar motion. A ferrofluid in contact with the moving portion damps its movement and reduces at least a mechanical resonance within 40 to 200 Hz. Claim 19 adds that the coil is an elongated oval with substantially flat sides. Claim 16 of the '117 patent recites a similar ferrofluid-damped actuator with generally flat, generally rectangular flexures that carry in-plane protrusions, housing proportions stated relative to its thickness, width, and length, and a pocket in the moving portion for a magnet.

Taction accused iPhone and Apple Watch models that use Apple's Taptic Engine. As the Federal Circuit described Taction's theory, the Taptic Engine's closed-loop controller together with its ferrofluid produces a highly damped output. For products with a single magnet rather than a plurality of magnets, both sides' Rule 50(a) motions show that Taction relied on the doctrine of equivalents.

How the case reached trial

Taction filed suit on April 26, 2021. Apple petitioned for inter partes review of every asserted claim, and the court later recounted that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board denied institution of all four petitions on April 18, 2022. On August 11, 2023, the court granted Apple summary judgment of noninfringement. It struck the opinions of Taction's infringement expert, Dr. James Oliver, on the claims' highly damped output requirement, and it construed that requirement to call for mechanical damping and a Q-factor below 1.5. In October 2023 the court denied Apple's motion for attorney fees, describing the case as "a heavily litigated but ultimately run-of-the-mill patent case."

On August 13, 2025, the Federal Circuit vacated that judgment and remanded in a precedential opinion (panel of Chief Judge Moore, Judge Chen, and Chief Judge Barnett of the Court of International Trade, sitting by designation). It held that striking Dr. Oliver's opinions under an unwritten "how" requirement read into the Southern District's Patent Local Rule 3.1(c) was an abuse of discretion. It agreed that a prosecution disclaimer limits the claims to transducers with highly damped output, but held that the claims are not limited to mechanical damping or to a Q-factor below 1.5. Trial began on September 14, 2026.

The damages record

Before trial, in an August 11, 2026 order, the court excluded the reasonable-royalty opinions of Taction's damages expert, Dr. Patrick F. Kennedy, because they relied on Dr. Oliver's technical apportionment opinions, which the court also excluded. The same order excluded opinions of Apple's damages expert, Julie Knox, that rested on valuations of Taction as a company. On September 3, the court let Taction serve a narrower supplemental report from Dr. Kennedy, limited to the parts of a supplemental Oliver report that the court found harmless, and denied Taction's request to try damages separately.

Apple's Rule 50(a) motion, filed September 23 before the case went to the jury, says the court excluded Dr. Kennedy's reasonable-royalty opinion in its entirety and that the jury heard no royalty rate from Taction's license with Corsair, which covers Corsair's HS60 headset. It argues that no evidence in the record supports an apportioned royalty and that evidence about the cost of ferrofluid and of Taptic Engine hardware is not tied to the value of the patents. It also argues that the Taptic Engines are undamped linear resonant actuators outside the claims, and that the claims are invalid for lack of written description, lack of enablement, and indefiniteness. Taction's Rule 50(a) motion asked for judgment of infringement and no invalidity.

Why it matters

The award is a single figure with no breakdown, and Apple's Rule 50(a) motion says the jury heard no expert reasonable-royalty opinion. Expect damages to be the center of Apple's post-trial motions, alongside its arguments that the accused Taptic Engines do not produce highly damped output and that the claims fail the written description, enablement, and definiteness requirements. The claim scope questions trace to the 2025 Federal Circuit opinion, which kept the highly damped output limitation but rejected the mechanical-damping and Q-factor limits.

What to watch next

Watch for entry of judgment, and then for any renewed motion for judgment as a matter of law and any motion for a new trial, which Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 50(b) and 59(b) require within 28 days after judgment is entered. Watch also for how the court handles the Rule 50(a) motions both sides filed before deliberations.