Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president, testified in court on Friday and said that Samsung hampered Apple’s iPhone and iPad sales by launching smartphones which were similar in design to Apple gadgetry.
Schiller who appeared as a witness in a federal court in San Jose, California during a damages retrial between Apple and Samsung told the eight-person jury under friendly questioning from an Apple attorney that “It’s much harder to create demand and people question our innovation and design skills like people never used to”.
Schiller told the jury that Samsung’s infringement of Apple patents has resulted in a sales loss for Apple for which the company needs to get compensated for. The iPad maker is claiming $380 million from Samsung for the patent infringement while Samsung is arguing $52 million would be a fair compensation.
The court jury on Thursday listened to Apple witnesses who claimed that the company would have sold more than 360,000 iPhones if Samsung wouldn’t have indulge into such patent infringement resulting in millions of dollars of losses.
Last year, the court ordered Samsung to pay over $1 billion to Apple after the jury was convinced that Samsung copied some of Apple’s iPhone features, such as using fingers to pinch and zoom on the screen, along with design touches such as the phone’s flat, black glass screen.
However, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in March ordered a retrial on about $400 million in damages, concluding that the previous jury made some errors in its calculations.
Samsung copied “many attributes of Apple’s products; its designs and features … the very essence of what Apple is about,” Schiller told the jury on Friday. “If we don’t have that, we don’t have Apple’s business “.
“We were simply trying to make our product better,” added Schiller.
Samsung will begin presenting witnesses on Friday, and Koh has set closing arguments for Tuesday.
