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Court Throws Out $533 Million Verdict Against Apple Over Data Storage Patent (9to5mac.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Mac: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit made a decision today to throw out the verdict of a two-year old legal case against Apple based on data storage patents. The original verdict reached by a Texas jury stuck Apple with $533 million in damages. Smartflash LLC targeted game developers who largely all settled out of court in 2014, but Apple defended its use of data storage management and payment processing technology in court. Reuters has more on the new developments: "The trial judge vacated the large damages award a few months after a Texas federal jury imposed it in February 2015, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said on Wednesday the judge should have ruled Smartflash's patents invalid and set aside the verdict entirely. A unanimous three-judge appeals panel said Smartflash's patents were too 'abstract' and did not go far enough in describing an actual invention to warrant protection."
They stopped innovating about five years ago on the Mac Pro and almost seven years ago on their MacBooks (laptops) since they don't support more memory than they did with their laptop that was released in April of 2010. That was almost seven years ago! We have System 76, Sager, and ThinkPads laptops here with 64 GB of RAM. We would buy MacBooks since they're just so much better (require about 1/10 of the work from our internal IT department since they run Windows and are crappy quality laptops) but we still have to buy them instead of MacBooks since we have to run several virtual machines at the same time and the limited amount of RAM on a MacBook is just crippling.