Apple Inc is being fined US$25,000 per day for missing a court-imposed deadline to produce evidence in a government lawsuit that alleges mobile chip supplier Qualcomm Inc has been imposing unfair licensing terms on the makers of smartphones.
The fine imposed on Thursday by a federal magistrate judge in San Jose, California, is retroactive to Dec. 16 and is to remain in effect until Dec. 29. If Apple has not produced all 1.3 million documents covered by an order issued in October, US Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins intends to increase the fine.
In a statement, Apple said it plans to appeal Cousins’ ruling in a case pitting the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Qualcomm, whose technology is used in most of the world’s smartphones.
“We have already produced millions of documents for this case and are working hard to deliver the millions more that have been requested in an unprecedented time frame,” said Apple, which is based in Cupertino, California.
San Diego-based Qualcomm declined comment.
The company is seeking Apple’s documents as part of its effort to prove the FTC’s allegations are wrong.
Apple sued Qualcomm in a different lawsuit shortly after the FTC lodged its complaint. Apple is accusing Qualcomm of abusing its power to extort royalties from iPhone innovations that have nothing to do with its technology. Qualcomm has denied those allegations and is countersuing Apple, raising the rancor between the two companies.
Even if Apple is fined the maximum amount of US$350,000 through Dec. 29 under the court ruling, it is unlikely to faze the company, which has about US$270 billion in cash.
Separately, iPhone owners from several US states sued Apple for not disclosing sooner that it issued software updates deliberately slowing older-model phones so that aging batteries lasted longer, saying that Apple’s silence led them to wrongly conclude that their only option was to buy newer, pricier iPhones.
The allegations were on Thursday filed in a lawsuit in Chicago federal court on behalf of five iPhone owners from Illinois, Ohio, Indiana and North Carolina, all of whom say they never would have bought new iPhones had Apple told them that simply replacing the batteries would have sped up their old ones. The suit alleges that Apple violated consumer fraud laws.
A similar lawsuit was on Thursday filed in Los Angeles. Both suits came a day after Apple confirmed what high-tech sleuths outside the company had already observed: The company had deployed software to slow some phones.
Apple said it was intended as a fix to deal with degraded lithium-ion batteries that could otherwise suddenly die.
The Chicago lawsuit suggests Apple’s motive might have been sinister, although it offers no evidence in the filing.
“Apple’s decision to purposefully ... throttle down these devices,” it says, “was undertaken to fraudulently induce consumers to purchase the latest” iPhone.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
The New Taiwan dollar and Taiwanese stocks surged on signs that trade tensions between the world’s top two economies might start easing and as US tech earnings boosted the outlook of the nation’s semiconductor exports. The NT dollar strengthened as much as 3.8 percent versus the US dollar to 30.815, the biggest intraday gain since January 2011, closing at NT$31.064. The benchmark TAIEX jumped 2.73 percent to outperform the region’s equity gauges. Outlook for global trade improved after China said it is assessing possible trade talks with the US, providing a boost for the nation’s currency and shares. As the NT dollar
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
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