Jury orders Apple to pay $5.7 billion in largest patent verdict in U.S. history

A federal jury in San Diego has ordered Apple to pay more than $5.7 billion to Taction Technology, a small haptics company, after finding that the vibration hardware inside iPhones and Apple Watches infringes two of its patents. The award, returned Friday afternoon, is the largest patent-infringement verdict in United States history, eclipsing judgments previously assessed against Apple, Intel and other technology companies.

The jury found that Apple's Taptic Engine — the component that produces the buzz felt when typing on a virtual keyboard, receiving a notification or tapping an icon — relies on tactile-transducer technology patented by Taction, a San Diego-based firm that makes haptic headphones and gaming accessories. Apple has said it will appeal.

The numbers

Court records show the jury settled on damages of $5,721,961,750, finding that Apple infringed claims 17 and 19 of U.S. Patent No. 10,659,885 and claim 16 of a related patent, both covering vibration-based transducers that let a user feel low-frequency, bass-range feedback through a handheld or worn device. The seven-person panel deliberated for parts of two days after a trial that opened September 14 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, in the case Taction Technology, Inc. v. Apple Inc., No. 3:21-cv-00812.

Crucially, jurors found Apple's infringement was not willful, a distinction that makes it far less likely a judge will multiply the award, which federal law allows up to threefold in cases of deliberate copying. The case's public docket shows the litigation has run for more than five years since Taction first sued in April 2021.

A long road back from summary judgment

The verdict follows a reversal that very nearly never happened. In 2023, the trial judge threw the case out at summary judgment, ruling that Taction had failed to show infringement and excluding testimony from Taction's technical expert under the district's local patent rules. Taction appealed, and in August 2025 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed that decision, holding in a published opinion that the lower court had abused its discretion by imposing an unwritten requirement on the expert's claim charts and had misread the disputed patent claims. That ruling sent the case back to San Diego for the trial that concluded this week.

Apple's Taptic Engine debuted with the original Apple Watch in 2014 and has since been built into the iPhone line and other products to simulate physical clicks and confirm touch input, as Apple's own support documentation for the feature describes. Taction argued at trial that later versions of the mechanism, which use magnetic flexures and ferrofluid rather than the coil-and-rod design in earlier models, still depend on the tactile-transducer approach it patented.

Who is affected

The immediate financial exposure falls on Apple, which reported net income of roughly $100 billion over the past four quarters and would absorb the judgment as a one-time charge if it is ultimately upheld. Taction itself is a small company, and much of its litigation has been financed by outside funders: court filings identify Gronostaj Investments LLC and Kenosha Investments LP, entities tied to the litigation-finance firm Burford Capital, as backers of the case. A magistrate judge overseeing the dispute earlier pressed the funders to explain statements they had made to the court about their role, an issue that remains separate from the infringement findings.

Apple's shares were largely unmoved by the news. The stock climbed the same day, pushing the company's market capitalization toward the $5 trillion mark, a sign that investors do not expect the verdict to be paid in full, or possibly at all, given how far the case still has to travel through post-trial motions and appeal.

Reaction

Taction's lead trial counsel, Lance Yang of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, said the outcome validated years of litigation.

"We're happy the jury found for Taction and vindicated its patent rights. Taction waited five and a half years for this case to get to trial, so it was a long time coming."

Apple disputed both the finding and the size of the award. "While we thank the jury for their consideration, we strongly disagree with today's verdict and the damages awarded, which are entirely unsupported by the facts," the company said in a statement provided to reporters. "Apple's Taptic Engine is fundamentally different from Taction's technology, which Taction's own testing of Apple's products confirmed during trial. Apple does not use Taction's technology, and we will appeal."

Patent attorneys following the case noted that the size of the award, while historic on paper, says little on its own about what Apple will eventually pay. Federal Circuit appeals have trimmed or erased large jury verdicts against Apple before; in 2018, the appeals court threw out a roughly $506 million verdict the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation had won against the company over a separate chip patent, finding jurors lacked a reasonable basis for their finding.

What happens next

The case now returns to the trial judge for post-verdict motions, in which Apple is expected to ask the court to overturn the jury's findings or reduce the damages before any figure becomes final. If those motions fail, Apple has said it will take the case back to the Federal Circuit, the same appellate court that revived the lawsuit last year and that will now decide whether the record supports both the infringement finding and the $5.7 billion figure. That process is likely to take at least a year, and legal analysts caution that final resolution, including any settlement, could look very different from Friday's number.