Apple on 13 October asked a federal court in the Southern District of California to throw out a $5.7 billion patent-infringement award a jury handed the haptics firm Taction Technology last month — the largest patent jury verdict in US history.
## A record-breaking number
On 25 September 2026, a San Diego jury found that the Taptic Engine haptic component in Apple's iPhone and Apple Watch infringed two Taction patents (claims 17 and 19 of US Patent 10,659,885, and claim 16 of 10,820,117) and awarded $5,721,961,750.
The jury also found the infringement was not willful — which usually forecloses trebled damages on top. Taction is a San Diego haptics company whose technology is also used in products such as headphones.
Apple's argument: an award "untethered" to the evidence
In its motion, Apple contends the award is "untethered to any evidence at all" and amounts to "impermissible guesswork on a massive scale": Taction never showed the jury what its patents were actually worth, leaving jurors to invent a figure. Apple also argues its Taptic Engine works differently from the technology described in Taction's patents, and that Taction's key expert used a testing method devised for the litigation rather than the one set out in the patents.
A case Apple once won
This is not the parties' first round. Apple won summary judgment of non-infringement in 2023; the Federal Circuit vacated that ruling in 2025 and sent the case back, which is how it reached a jury. Apple is now asking the court to overturn the verdict and has said it will appeal — so the record figure is, for now, only a jury verdict, far from a final, enforceable judgment.
J&C notes that a headline-grabbing jury award is often not the finish line: what usually decides cases like this is whether the damages methodology, and the expert testimony behind it, hold up. For a party seeking large patent damages, a damages model tied tightly to the patents' value and able to survive a Daubert challenge tends to matter more than the number itself; for a defendant, post-trial motions and appeal remain the key chances to pull that number back to a defensible range.
Source: www.govinfo.gov | www.reuters.com
