MacRumors

Begun in 2012 over a concern that Samsung's products willfully infringed on Apple's patents for the iPhone, a jury eventually ruled largely in Apple's favor and the Cupertino company was awarded over $1 billion in damages. The award was later slightly reduced after it was determined the original jury had erred in one portion of its decision, but Samsung was still owing roughly $900 million to Apple.

Today, however, a U.S. appeals court is ruling to reverse another significant portion of the judgment, finding Samsung wasn't in violation of "trade dress" and therefore doesn't owe as much as was previously awarded by the courts (via Bloomberg Business).

The exact portion of the case being reassessed amounts to about $382 million according to Samsung, leaving the Korean company still owing Apple $548 million in damages if the lower courts looking at the case decide to reject this part of the award. The actual award amount will be recalculated by the lower court following today's decision.

The term "trade dress" refers directly to the ways in which a product is packaged and presented, and was originally one of the bigger points of win for Apple when the jury ruled in its favor back in 2012. After Samsung appealed, the appeals court on the case found the iPhone's overall look "can't be protected," thus requiring a recalculation of Apple's estimated $920 million damage award.

The part of the original decision upheld in today's ruling was Samsung's general patent infringement when in comparison with Apple products, including features like pinch and zoom, double tap to zoom, and other basic features patented by Apple. So while Samsung may yet escape without penalty over its phones having a similar look to the iPhone, the company will still be required to pay for violating Apple's patents.

The next part of the case is in limbo as a lower court recalculates the $930 million in damages owed by Samsung. The $382 million of that $920 million awarded to Apple, regarding the trade dress, is what will be addressed specifically by the lower court, with the amount being either lowered or removed altogether from the overall sum.

Tim Cook this weekend gave a commencement speech to the 2015 graduating class of George Washington University, sharing a number of reflections and his perspective on life for graduating students and their families. As announced in February, Cook was asked to speak at the event in Washington, DC following a nomination process by students earlier in the year.

Cook started off the 20-minute speech by reflecting on a few moments from his teenage years in which he met both President Jimmy Carter, one of his personal heroes, and Alabama Governor George Wallace, a man he disagreed with vehemently even at the young age of 16. The two men's similar backgrounds - they were both from the South and Democrats - helped teach Cook about how his internal journey in life was just as important as his external passage through schools, universities, and jobs.

My own journey in life was just beginning. I hadn't even applied to college yet at that point. For you graduates, the process of discovering yourself, of inventing yourself, of reinventing yourself is about to begin in earnest. It's about finding your values and committing to live by them. You have to find your North Star. And that means choices. Some are easy. Some are hard. And some will make you question everything.

Twenty years after my visit to Washington, I met someone who made me question everything. Who upended all my assumptions in the very best way. That was Steve Jobs.

Cook mentioned that just like Apple in the late nineties he was also "rudderless" and looked to Jobs' invitation to join the company and "change the world" not as a skeptic but as a believer. As expected, Cook looked back on the decision as one of his best and encouraged the graduates of George Washington to "find your North Star." The Apple CEO concluded his address at the university by taking a picture of the amassed crowd of graduates, claiming his position at the podium was "the best view in the world."

MacRumors reader Andras Szep was on hand for the event, sharing a few photos and noting he was lucky enough to find a seat up front for Cook's speech and get a few moments afterwards to speak briefly with the Apple CEO, congratulating him on his speech and shaking his hand.

Apple fans waiting for updates to the 15-inch MacBook Pro and 27-inch iMac may get good news sooner than expected, with MacG.co [Google Translate] reporting on Monday that updates to both models are expected as soon as this Wednesday.

The website cites an unnamed source who has provided accurate information on a number of occasions in the past, but provides no further details regarding the exact specs and upgrades that could go into the two new computers. Given that the 13-inch MacBook Pro was updated back in March with the expected processing and graphics boosts, as well as a new Force Touch trackpad, it's safe to say the new 15-inch model should receive similar upgrades.

As MacG.co points out and we have discussed in recent days, shipping times for the 15-inch MacBook Pro have been slipping, sparking speculation of a WWDC reveal for updated models.

It is unclear exactly what processors will be included in the new MacBook Pro, as Intel's timeline for Broadwell chips had previously estimated a July-August release for chips appropriate for the machine. Intel did, however, quietly launch a few higher-end chips in the Broadwell family two weeks ago, suggesting production may in fact be ahead of schedule.

The site doesn't touch much on the iMac update, beyond pointing out that the only model with a delayed shipping estimate is the higher-end non-retina 27-inch iMac with a 3.4 GHz processor. We noted slipping shipping estimates on iMacs a month ago, but while most of the models returned to "in stock" status shortly after, it now appears Apple has indeed been drawing down stock ahead of this week's update.

Delayed shipping times in the weeks ahead of a major event like WWDC generally appear as good indicators of what product categories may be getting an update, but given recent updates to the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro, the release of the new MacBook, and the pending 15-inch MacBook Pro and 27-inch iMac updates, Apple could once again have a software-focused WWDC keynote similar to last year unless it decides to show off an update to the Mac Pro.

After filming began earlier in January, and a few photo leaks soon thereafter, not much had been heard surrounding Universal Picture's Steve Jobs movie. Today, however, the studio released the first official trailer for the new movie.

The trailer is mostly a single shot of Michael Fassbender as Jobs, with cast voice overs providing snippets and teases of conversations regarding Jobs' true legacy at Apple. While it doesn't reveal much that wasn't already known, the one minute teaser provides a handful of closer looks as Michael Fassbender, Seth Rogen, Kate Winslet, and Jeff Daniels as Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Joanna Hoffman, and John Sculley, respectively.

The movie has faced turmoil over the years as it began development, with multiple actors up for the titular role and even a change of studios due to scheduling conflicts between Danny Boyle, the film's director, and Sony. This year, as the film's October 9 release date grew nearer, casting calls and set photos began popping up online, even going so far as to offer fans the first glimpse of Fassbender in full costume as Jobs.

In one of its latest efforts to bolster its mapping capabilities, Apple appears to have acquired Coherent Navigation, a Bay Area GPS-related firm founded in 2008 by engineers from Stanford and Cornell.

One of Coherent Navigation's areas of focus was High Integrity GPS ("iGPS"), a system that combines signals from the traditional mid-earth orbit GPS satellites with those from the low-earth satellites of voice and data provider Iridium to offer greater accuracy and precision, higher signal integrity, and greater jam resistance. Iridium touts iGPS as having the potential to provide location information accurate to within centimeters.

A number of Coherent's key employees recently began working for Apple, including tech veteran and CEO Paul Lego in January and co-founders William Bencze and Brent Ledvina as of last month. Coherent's website has also been taken offline, but on April 30 the name servers for the domain were updated to point to Apple's servers.

It is unclear exactly what the Coherent Navigation team is working on at Apple and whether there was a specific technology Apple was interested in or if it simply wanted to apply the expertise of Coherent's employees to its own projects. Lego simply notes that he is now a member of Apple's Maps team, while Ledvina and Bencze are working in similar location engineering roles.

Coherent Navigation would be just the latest in a long string of mapping-related acquisitions Apple has made over the last several years, including the developers behind Pin Drop, Locationary, WifiSLAM, Hopstop, Embark, and Broadmap. Apple has continued to improve its mapping services since a rough transition away from Google Maps with the release of iOS 6 in 2012, with the company working to add features like transit information and perhaps Street View-like imagery to its services.

Update: Apple has given its standard confirmation statement to The New York Times.

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” the company said.

No other details on the deal have been released.

Popular grocery store chain Trader Joe's has installed new NFC-compatible VeriFone touchscreen checkout terminals in some of its stores, allowing for contactless payments. First noticed by AppleInsider, some of these stores with the new payment terminals are accepting Apple Pay, which works at any location that allows for contactless payments.

MacRumors has verified that Apple Pay works in some Trader Joe's stores. In the Raleigh, North Carolina area, we were able to make a purchase at Trader Joe's with the Apple Watch using Apple Pay.

Not all Trader Joe's stores have the new payment terminals at this time, and not all stores with the new terminals are accepting Apple Pay via NFC. The Apple Pay logo is present on the checkout terminal, however, suggesting Trader Joe's is perhaps considering becoming an official Apple Pay partner.

Trader Joe's is known for its high-quality low-priced products, and it has more than 400 locations across the United States. If Trader Joe's becomes an official Apple Pay partner, it will join other grocery store chains like Whole Foods, Dick's Fresh Market, Winn-Dixie, Bi-Lo, Food Maxx, Lucky, Meijer, Sprouts, and more.

With the Worldwide Developers Conference coming up in early June, there's been some question about whether we might see a new 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro at the event. Shipping estimates for the high-end 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro have recently increased to two to three weeks, perhaps suggesting Apple is tapering down production on the existing model.

Supply shortages can sometimes signal an imminent update, but there's uncertainty when it comes to a potential 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro refresh due to a distinct lack of Broadwell chips appropriate for the machine. For several months, we've had no updates on the release date of Broadwell chips that would be used in the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, making it difficult to pin down an upgrade timeline.

Along with slipping shipping estimates, however, we have another potential piece of evidence pointing towards the possibility of a June refresh -- a MacRumors reader who ordered a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro has received a delayed delivery date ranging from June 9 to June 15. June 9 is one day after the kick off of the Worldwide Developers Conference and the day after the event keynote where any new product would be introduced.

The Retina MacBook Pro in question is a custom configured 15-inch model with a 2.8Ghz processor and 512GB of storage, originally ordered on April 23. At the time, it had a two to three week delivery estimate, suggesting it should have arrived in May, but Apple's pushed it back to seven weeks.

A single customer's order set to arrive on June 9 just after the WWDC keynote is curious and may suggest Apple's waiting until a refresh to ship his order, but there's also a chance that it's a mere coincidence. It's entirely possible we won't see updated 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro models for several more months.

We last heard Broadwell chips for the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro were coming in July or August, making a WWDC refresh unlikely, but a handful of desktop-class chips in the same family began shipping two weeks ago, suggesting Intel might be ahead of schedule.

If Intel is ready to ship the chips or if Apple has already quietly received shipments ahead of a wider release, there's a chance we'll see a Retina MacBook Pro update at WWDC. If the chips are not shipping out until July or August, a WWDC refresh or update announcement is not likely.

As we said in a deeper post covering potential chip upgrades for the Retina MacBook Pro and the iMac, Intel's Broadwell chip delays and Broadwell's convergence with Skylake chip release dates have made it difficult to divine accurate update timelines for these machines.

(Thanks, Joel!)

Following the acquisition of Oculus by Facebook last year, not much news came out regarding the virtual reality headset's availability to its non-developer fanbase. Recently, however, Oculus confirmed the Rift will be up for pre-order later this year, with the first units shipping sometime in the first quarter of 2016.

Atman Binstock, Chief Architect at Oculus and technical director of the Rift, today wrote a blog post on the company's website providing more details on the exact rig configuration PC players can expect to need when playing games on the Rift. Towards the end of the blog, Binstock also notes that development for the Rift on both Mac and Linux has "paused" to deliver as strong a launch as possible on the headset's sole platform - Windows.

"Our development for OS X and Linux has been paused in order to focus on delivering a high quality consumer-level VR experience at launch across hardware, software, and content on Windows. We want to get back to development for OS X and Linux but we don’t have a timeline."

The Rift has had a long and bumpy road ever since it was introduced in 2012 with a developer kit version being sold both on the company's website and as a $300 reward tier on its widely known Kickstarter campaign. Ever since, the Rift has shown up at numerous gaming conventions and electronics shows, but not until this year was any sort of hint given concerning when a mass-marketed consumer version would finally be available.

Although the lengthy development process for the Oculus Rift is more than understandable - the consumer version plans to have improved head tracking, a wireless headset, and even integrated audio - today's news of a delayed launch on Mac and Linux will undoubtedly be disappointing for many fans. For those interested in seeing what sort of system requirements the virtual reality headset will require on Windows PC's, check out Binstock's full blog post here.

Kevin King, IHS Technology Research Director for China, claimed on Chinese microblogging service Weibo that Apple's next-generation iPhone will feature a 12-megapixel rear-facing camera with smaller pixels (via G4Games), corroborating the same prediction made by well-informed KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo earlier this week.

Apple has used an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera sensor since the iPhone 4s was released in late 2011, so the megapixel bump will be the first in nearly four years if the pair of analysts are correct. Prior to that, the iPhone 4 had a 5-megapixel camera and the iPhone 3GS had a 3-megapixel shooter. Given that megapixels don't always matter, however, software improvements are often more important for image quality.

Last November, well-known Apple pundit John Gruber of Daring Fireball said the next iPhone could have "the biggest camera jump ever" with a dual-lens system that delivers DSLR-quality imagery, but a later report dismissed the rumor since Apple would need to redesign the current chassis of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, which is unlikely for this year's refresh based on the history of "S" models.

Apple's next-generation iPhones are rumored to retain 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch screen sizes, powered by an A9 processor with 2GB of LPDDR4 RAM and featuring Force Touch, improved Touch ID recognition, gesture control support, an additional microphone near the speakers for improved voice quality, a new rose gold color option, internal mechanical design changes and more.

The Apple Watch has been in high demand since the wearable began accepting pre-orders over a month ago, with the first wave of Space Black Link Bracelet, Leather Loop, and Modern Buckle just now shipping to customers this week.

A few reports have pointed to defective Taptic Engines produced by an Apple supplier in Shenzhen, China as the main reason behind the bottleneck, but a new story today out of DigiTimes suggests dramatic labor shortages during the Lunar New Year could have been the main source of the Apple Watch's low yield rate in the weeks after launch.

"Because of labor shortages during the Lunar New Year holidays, Quanta was forced to borrow manpower from other manufacturers and was only able to deliver limited shipments in the first quarter," said Quanta vice chairman CC Leung. "However, Quanta already has sufficient capacity to manufacture all the orders and should see a giant contribution from its wearable device business in the second quarter."

Interestingly, Leung never mentions Apple or the Apple Watch by name and even "declined to state the name of its client or its products," according to DigiTimes. The vice chairman did note, however, that the wearable in question is "unlike the smartwatches it produced before" and that it "has a lot of functions in it and its client is satisfied with the product." Given that the Apple Watch's unit shortage is very public knowledge and considering that Quanta is the primary source of its manufacturing, it would appear that the "smartwatch" in question is the Apple Watch.

Rumors of a limited Apple Watch supply began just a few weeks after the wearable was announced at Apple's "Spring Forward" event in March. Although the Apple Watch's supply has been strained, Apple confirmed before the Apple Watch launch that some models may arrive before their estimated delivery dates, with many 4-6 week shipping estimates improving dramatically for some customers.

Although there are exceptions, most Apple Watch orders placed today have between a 2-3 week and 3-5 week estimate for the smaller 38mm case size, while most models in the 42mm size are sitting on a delivery estimate of July. But, with today's possible hint at an even more amped up production line alongside Apple's already impressive attempt to come in ahead of delivery expectations, it's still possible many orders will reach their owners ahead of time.

Apple has pushed back the target release date of its home automation platform, HomeKit. According to a new report from Fortune that cites sources involved with the program, the May-June target launch date has shifted to late August or September.

HomeKit, announced at last year's Worldwide Developers Conference, is Apple's platform that links multiple home automation devices together with a single set of protocols to allow them to be controlled through the Apple ecosystem. Apple has demoed HomeKit just once, back in June, and at the time, the company did not give a prospective release date.

Many manufacturers began preparing HomeKit-compatible products following the initial debut of the platform, and several of those were shown off at CES. iDevices, for example, introduced a HomeKit-enabled smart plug, while Schlage demoed its "Schlage Sense" smart lock designed to work with HomeKit.

At CES, many of the companies gave prospective spring release dates for their products, leading us to believe that HomeKit was perhaps going to debut during April or May, but Fortune's sources say HomeKit is not quite ready for an official launch. Apple may, however, show off the platform again in the near future, perhaps at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference alongside an updated Apple TV.

Sources close to the situation say Apple is planning a smaller announcement around HomeKit in the near term, but not the official launch. Apparently, making it easy to sign in and get your devices (door locks, light blubs, et cetera) online is much harder to do than Apple anticipated. One source says the code base associated with that part of the process "blew up" and required way too much memory for smaller, battery-powered devices, so Apple is trying to shrink the code back down to size.

HomeKit promises to make a major advance towards a introducing a fully connected home, using the Apple TV as an automation hub and relying on Siri for simple voice commands to control hardware in the home. With HomeKit-enabled products, Apple's voice assistant Siri can be asked to perform tasks like "Close the garage," "Turn off the lights," or "Lower the temperature."

When HomeKit is ready to launch, manufacturers will have a wide selection of products available that will work with the system. Apple finalized its HomeKit specification in October and is working with several notable partners include Philips and Honeywell, among others.

Update 1:11 PM PT: In a statement provided to The Wall Street Journal, Apple has refuted rumors of delays, stating that the first HomeKit accessories will launch next month. That suggests HomeKit will indeed see its official debut in the near future, perhaps at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

"HomeKit [hardware certification] has been available for just a few months and we already have dozens of partners who have committed to bringing HomeKit accessories to market and we're looking forward to the first ones coming next month," said Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller.

After filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy back in February, confusion began to swirl surrounding the future - or lack thereof - regarding RadioShack's brand name and the sensitive customer data the tech seller has accumulated over the years. Yesterday, the auction for those assets ended and New York-based investment firm Standard General came out on top, winning the brand with a $26.2 million bid.

Last week, as bidding went underway for the bankrupt company's IP and data, Apple chimed in with a filing of its own at the bankruptcy court in Wilmington, Delaware where the proceedings were underway (via Dallas Business Journal).

Apple's objections note that RadioShack was not holding up its end of a previous reseller agreement made between the two companies that would prevent the retailer from the selling of Apple customer information. The Cupertino company went so far as to say that that information does not fall within RadioShack's estate, meaning anyone who buys the company - namely Standard General - has no right to access any of that sensitive data.

Apple isn't the only objector to the sale of customer data, with AT&T reaching a settlement with RadioShack and any "purchaser of its assets" to prevent the bankrupt company from the selling, disclosure, or transferring of AT&T's protected information. The state of Texas itself filed an objection in March, claiming the sale of customer data should be prevented as it violates the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act and basic consumer protection laws set in place within the state.

Frances Smith, a law partner at Dallas-based Shackelford, Melton, McKinley & Norton, LLP, believes the disruption by the complaints set against RadioShack's consumer data sale could prevent the sensitive information from being included in the auction, and possibly even shift the true price of RadioShack's estate and assets at auction.

“What could happen is the judge approves the sale of everything or approves the sale with the carve out for the customer info,” She said. “I don’t think there’s a scenario where he just doesn’t approve the sale because there are a lot of other things going on.”

Although it has the winning bid, Standard General isn't out of the woods yet. The judge overseeing the case still needs to grant approval of the bid for the hedge fund to truly take over the RadioShack IP and any estate deemed fit by the court to be properly under the now-defunct company's ownership. This includes that sensitive customer data Apple and the other companies are worried about, which boils down to about 67 million physical addresses and 8.5 million email addresses, as AppleInsider points out. The hearing regarding all of these claims is set for next week on May 20.