Taction Technology has 27 patent applications in five families, across every topic it has ever filed on. Apple has 2,204 haptics applications since 2011. Immersion has 2,745.
Taction Technology has 27 patent applications in five families, across every topic it has ever filed on. Apple has 2,204 haptics applications since 2011. Immersion has 2,745. On Friday, September 25, a San Diego jury awarded Taction $5.7 billion against Apple.
The verdict is not final. Apple says its Taptic Engine is fundamentally different from Taction’s technology and that it will appeal. Burford Capital, a litigation finance firm with a financial entitlement in the case, says its share would be about $1.4 billion if the award were paid as-is. In the same statement it says the amount is likely to change and that very few large patent verdicts survive the post-verdict process intact.
I do not know how this ends. What I can do is measure the field the verdict landed in, because that shows how unusual the outcome is.
I built a Boolean universe on Minesoft Origin (searched September 30, 2026): applications filed since 2011 that mention haptic, vibrotactile, tactile feedback, tactile actuators or transducers, or linear resonant actuators, and that carry classifications for haptic interfaces, tactile signaling, mechanical vibration generation, linear motors, game haptics, phone vibration alerts, vibration massage, or earphone and speaker drivers.
The classification filter matters. The keyword search alone returned 82,605 applications, but it swept in intraocular lens “haptics,” injector pens, vaping devices and driver-assist systems. The filtered set is 29,288 applications in 11,810 extended families.
Applications grew from 1,197 in 2011 to 2,610 in 2017. Then they slid to 2,023 in 2023, a 22 percent drop from the peak. The 2024 bar (1,781) is still filling in, because applications publish about eighteen months after filing. I left 2025 and 2026 off the chart for the same reason.
There is no hockey stick here. Haptics is a mature field, and its annual filing volume has been flat to falling for six years.
By ultimate owner: Immersion 2,745 applications, Apple 2,204, Samsung 1,031, Sony 841, Microsoft 723, LG 579, Meta 452, Alphabet 435. Individual inventors add 1,137. Automotive names show up too, with Porsche SE (the holding company that controls Volkswagen) at 356 and Valeo at 246.
Taction’s bar sits on a different basis, and I want to be plain about that. It is the company’s whole portfolio, 27 applications in five families (19 of the applications are US), not only the haptics filings that fall inside my universe. My universe misses part of Taction’s own vocabulary, which leans on phrases like “tactile transducer” and “vibration module.” Even after I widened the vocabulary to include those phrases, only three of its five families landed inside the filtered set. Using the whole portfolio is the generous comparison. Even so, Apple has about 82 times as many haptics applications as Taction has applications in total (2,204 divided by 27).
The top of that ranking belongs to a different kind of owner. Immersion licenses haptic patents and software to device makers; its annual report describes licensing as its core model. In June 2024 it bought a controlling interest in Barnes & Noble Education, so it is no longer only an IP company. For two decades, though, it has been the best-known example of one in haptics.
Its reputation came from enforcement. In September 2004 a jury found that Sony’s PlayStation infringed two Immersion patents and awarded $82.0 million for sales through June 30, 2004. In March 2005 the court entered judgment for $90.7 million with interest and issued a permanent injunction against the PlayStation system, stayed while Sony appealed. Sony settled in March 2007, still mid-appeal. Press accounts put the payments at roughly $120 million, including about $97 million in damages and interest and $22.5 million in license payments through 2009, along with a license for Sony.
The filing record shows what came after. Immersion filed 508 haptics applications in 2014 and 440 in 2018. It filed 297 in 2019, 46 in 2020, 16 in 2021, and one each in 2022 and 2023. The search returned none for 2024, a year that is still filling in. Of Immersion’s 2,748 applications in the set, 2,508 (91 percent) were filed between 2013 and 2019. Its filings are spread across the US (859), Japan (602), China (433), Europe (424) and Korea (372).
I cannot say why Immersion stopped adding to the portfolio, and Immersion can. What the data shows is that the largest owner in the field is licensing a body of patents that was almost entirely filed in 2019 or earlier (2,684 of 2,748 applications). For an IP company, the portfolio’s value is the royalty stream it can still collect. ipCG’s approach to valuing licensing patents is to apply a royalty rate to the licensee’s revenues, which is why collection matters as much as coverage.
Apple filed 23 haptics applications in 2011, 230 in 2015, and 298 at the 2017 peak. It filed 138 in 2023. That is a 54 percent drop from the peak, against 22 percent for the field as a whole.
The data shows the pattern. It does not show the reason, and Apple is the one who can supply that.
I split the universe into seven lanes. They overlap, so the counts do not add up to 29,288.
Haptic effects, waveforms and drive signals: 8,631 applications. Touchscreens, touchpads, keyboards and buttons: 8,307. Actuator hardware, meaning piezo, voice coil, flexure, motor and magnet terms: 7,560. VR, AR, gloves and wearables: 6,548. Vehicles and driver interfaces: 4,421. Headphones, speakers and audio-frequency work: 2,646. Surgical, robotic and teleoperation: 1,018.
Anyone filing in the first four lanes files next to thousands of others. That is what makes the verdict interesting: it did not come from any of those crowds.
The two patents at issue are US 10,659,885 (issued May 19, 2020) and US 10,820,117 (issued Oct 27, 2020), according to court docket summaries and press coverage. The first is titled “Systems and methods for generating damped electromagnetically actuated planar motion for audio-frequency vibrations.” Its abstract describes damped, planar, moving-magnet vibration modules that give a uniform response from 40 to 200 Hz. The family’s first publications date to 2016.
I read the front page and abstract of the first patent and the titles and abstracts in the family. I did not read the claims of either patent for scope, and the jury’s findings turn on claims. The jury found infringement of two claims in one patent and one claim in the other, and did not find willful infringement, according to AppleInsider.
Press coverage adds one more detail. It says Taction argued that Apple’s newer Taptic Engines use flexures with ferrofluid to control the moving mass, where earlier versions used coil springs and a central rod. Apple says it does not use Taction’s technology.
I searched that damping technique inside the universe: ferrofluid, magnetic fluid or magnetorheological terms.
The result is 420 applications, or 1.4 percent of the haptics set. Inventus Engineering leads with 91, followed by Valeo (43), Immersion (41), the French atomic and alternative energies commission CEA (37), CK Materials Lab (35) and ZF (23). Apple has 7 and Microsoft 7. The lane belongs to specialists, automotive suppliers and research groups, not to the consumer electronics giants.
One caution. A filing that mentions a technique says nothing about what ships in a product. Apple’s seven applications tell you Apple wrote about the technique, not that its products use it.
A jury verdict is a claim on money, not money. Taction now faces post-trial motions in the district court and, after that, an appeal to the Federal Circuit. Apple says it will appeal. Burford’s own statement says it could recover substantially less than the headline figure or, in some circumstances, lose its entire investment.
History gives reasons for caution when the defendant is Apple. Press reports describe VirnetX’s $502 million verdict against Apple being thrown out on appeal after the Patent Trial and Appeal Board canceled the patents. The Supreme Court declined review in February 2024, after a fight that reports describe as 14 years long. Press roundups list other large Apple verdicts that were reduced, erased or sent back for retrial, including awards to WARF, Optis and Caltech.
Immersion’s own history shows both sides. Sony did pay, about two and a half years after the 2004 verdict, and the money arrived inside a settlement that also gave Sony a license. Even then the money did not move cleanly. Microsoft had settled with Immersion in 2003 and paid $26 million. When Immersion later settled with Sony, Microsoft contested the terms of that deal, and in August 2008 Immersion paid Microsoft $20.75 million to close the dispute.
The funder’s cut adds a second layer. ipCG’s view is that litigation funders typically take a large share of backend proceeds, in the range of 40 to 60 percent. Burford says its share here would be about $1.4 billion of $5.7 billion, roughly a quarter. Burford has not disclosed its terms, so the two figures may not measure the same thing. Either way, what reaches the patent owner is the verdict minus the funder, the lawyers and the years.
That is why ipCG’s approach is to size damages and test whether a patent is litigation-grade before enforcing it. Winning is the first step, and collecting is the one that pays.
If the award stands, it will be one of the largest patent verdicts in US history, as Burford describes it. If it does not, it will join the large verdicts that shrank or disappeared after trial. Burford, which has the most direct financial interest in the number, is the one warning that this second path is the common one.
Four things follow from the data, whatever happens on appeal.
For founders, the field rewards depth over pile size. Two owners hold thousands of haptics applications, yet the largest jury number went to a five-family company whose two patents cover one specific thing, damped flat vibration modules. Depth on the one mechanism a competitor cannot easily design around is a better goal than a long list.
For investors, count what a portfolio covers before counting how many patents it holds. The 1.4 percent lane and the 8,000-application lanes are different bets.
For IP companies, the asset is the royalty stream, so the work is collecting it. Immersion shows both halves: a verdict that turned into cash only after a settlement, and a portfolio whose recent growth has stopped.
For lenders and acquirers, the same patents carry different prices depending on who is pricing. A litigation funder prices the odds in court. An acquirer prices what the technology does for its own product. A lender prices what the patent would sell for if a loan went bad. Taction’s patents today sit somewhere between a very large number and close to zero, and the appeal will decide where.
This is a research observation built on bibliographic data, not a legal opinion or a valuation. Patent counsel can tell you what any specific claim covers.
– Source: Minesoft Origin, Boolean searches run September 30, 2026. Counts are applications (one per application) unless stated; the 11,810 figure is extended families.
– Universe: `ATAC=(haptic OR vibrotactile OR (tactile W3 (feedback OR actuator OR transducer)) OR (linear W2 resonant W2 actuator)) AND AD>=2011 AND CPC=(G06F3/01 OR G08B6/00 OR B06B1/ OR H02K33/ OR H02K35/ OR A63F13/285 OR H04M19/047 OR A61H23/ OR H04R1/10 OR H04R9/ OR G06F2203/01)`
– Lanes: the universe ANDed with lane vocabulary (touch interfaces, effects and waveforms, actuator hardware, VR and wearables, vehicles, audio, surgical and robotic). Lanes overlap.
– Damping lane: the universe ANDed with `ATAC=(ferrofluid OR “magnetic fluid” OR magnetorheolog OR (ferromagnetic W2 fluid))`.
– Taction: `PA=(Taction Technology)`, 27 applications and 5 extended families, all topics. A separate company that trades as “Taction” (event forecasting) is excluded.
– Charts stop at 2024 because applications publish about eighteen months after filing.
– Verdict facts: Burford Capital statement (September 25, 2026) and AppleInsider (September 26, 2026). Patent numbers: court docket summaries and press coverage, matched to Minesoft records.
– Immersion: `UO=(Immersion Corp)` ANDed with the universe, searched October 1, 2026; 2,748 applications by direct query (the owner ranking shows 2,745; the difference is name matching). The Sony verdict and judgment figures come from Immersion’s March 2005 press release filed with the SEC. The 2007 settlement amounts come from press accounts and Game Developer, and are rounded. The Microsoft figures come from Game Developer’s August 2008 report. Immersion’s business description and its June 2024 Barnes & Noble Education stake come from its fiscal 2025 annual report as summarized in search results.
– Collection history: VirnetX and the other Apple verdicts are from press reports (CNBC, Bloomberg Law and a Cryptopolitan roundup), not court records. The 40 to 60 percent funder range is ipCG’s general methodology view, and Burford has not disclosed the terms of its own arrangement.
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Written by
Seth Cronin