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Today: Apple (AAPL) news all over, as the Cupertino company returns to court with Samsung, begins selling the iPad Mini with Retina display and loses market share in the smartphone battle. Also: Pandora gets a boost on Wall Street while Tesla falls.
The Lead: Apple faces the good, the bad and the judge
Apple dominated Silicon Valley technology news Tuesday, as the Cupertino company's retrial with rival Samsung kicked off, the newest iPad had its debut, and the iPhone's market share continued to dwindle.
In San Jose, part two of the battle of the tech giants kicked off, as a retrial began to determine the penalty Samsung will pay for roughly half of the products a previous trial determined violated Apple's patents on mobile technology. Judge Lucy Koh struck down about $450 million of the more than $1 billion verdict the previous trial awarded Apple, and the new jury will decide a new total, with the results expected to set parameters for future battles between these two companies and other tech giants.
"The trial is important for patent law writ large," Brian Love, a Santa Clara University law professor, told The Mercury News. "Decisions made in this trial, and in any appeal that might follow, will set precedent for many patent cases to come."
Tuesday's courtroom action focused on choosing that jury, with one whole slate of potential members asked to leave after it was found out they talked about the case while waiting to be called. With jury selection dragging out, it seemed opening statements would wait until Wednesday.
For fans of Apple devices, Tuesday's big news was the arrival of the iPad Mini with Retina display, which the company announced last month along with the iPad Air, but failed to give a firm release date for the smaller tablet. Apple began selling the device in two colors on its website Tuesday morning, and sent out a news release celebrating the arrival.
The newest iPad Mini, with a price tag higher than the previous iteration's debut cost, may not last, however. Reports have suggested that Apple's component suppliers are having trouble producing enough of the high-definition display, which could hurt supply in the holiday shopping season. Apple marketing executive Phil Schiller hinted at the issue in Tuesday's news release, saying, "We're working hard to get as many as we can in the hands of our customers."
That could be an issue, as research has suggested that the iPad Mini is more popular with tablet customers than the full-sized iPad since the smaller option was introduced last year. Apple needs the iPad Mini to boost sales as Android tablets siphon market share from the world's most valuable company.
Google's (GOOG) Android mobile operating system is also gaining share in smartphones, even as Samsung seeks to switch to a different operating system. Android devices accounted for more than 80 percent of the smartphones shipped in the third quarter of the year, IDC reported Tuesday, and an advance by Microsoft left Apple's iPhone with a smaller share of the market, at 12.9 percent versus 14.4 percent in the same quarter last year.
IDC reported that Apple's high prices and lack of a larger smartphone, known to some as a "phablet," were major reasons for the advance of Android and Windows Phone at the expense of iOS.
"Despite their differences in market share, (Android and Windows Phone) both have one important factor behind their success: price," IDC research manager Ramon Llamas said in Tuesday's news release. "Both platforms have a selection of devices available at prices low enough to be affordable to the mass market, and it is the mass market that is driving the entire market forward."
"In 3Q13, phablet shipments accounted for 21 percent of the smartphone market, up from just 3 percent a year ago. We believe the absence of a large-screen device may have contributed to Apple's inability to grow share in the third quarter," fellow IDC analyst Ryan Reith said.
Amid the panoply of news, Apple stock gained 0.2 percent Tuesday to $520.01.
SV150 market report: Pandora and Intel gain, Tesla turns around
Silicon Valley stocks outpaced the overall market Tuesday on Wall Street, as some disappointing earnings afflicted the Dow Jones industrial average while strong performances by Pandora, Intel (INTC) and other tech firms boosted the SV150.
Pandora gained 4 percent to $28.24 after Needham analyst Laura Martin raised her price rating on the Oakland company's stock. Martin noted that the streaming-music service released strong numbers for October and has been investing in salespeople to attack the local radio market as well as attempting to push into listeners' automobiles, both of which could be lucrative ventures. Intel added 1.1 percent to $24.43 despite a downgrade from MKM Partners, as Bloomberg News reported that the Santa Clara chipmaker had found a potential buyer for its television set-top box initiative in Liberty Global.
Cisco (CSCO) gained 1.2 percent to $23.73 a day ahead of its quarterly earnings report, which JMP Securities reported could help other networking companies such as San Jose's Ubiquiti, which gained 3.5 percent to $41.68. Yahoo (YHOO) continued to get a boost from Alibaba's recent successes, gaining 0.8 percent to $34.07, and Google advanced 0.1 percent to $1,011.78 amid reports of new offerings for its Google Glass wearable computer.
On the negative side, Tesla Motors (TSLA)' Wall Street rebound on Monday did not last long: The Palo Alto electric car maker fell 4.8 percent to $137.80 Tuesday. Tesla was joined by the other two members of the SV150's cleantech sector, as SolarCity declined 2.1 percent to $41.90 and SunPower (SPWRA) lost 3.6 percent to $31.25. Twitter dropped 2.3 percent to $41.90 as the San Francisco microblogging company announced its first new product offering since going public and seeing its share price jump.
Up: Pandora, Yelp, Advanced Micro Devices, Juniper, Zynga, Electronic Arts (ERTS), Cisco, Intel, Salesforce, Oracle (ORCL), Facebook, Yahoo, Workday, VMware
Down: Tesla, SunPower, Twitter, SolarCity, Netflix (NFLX), LinkedIn, Applied Materials, Symantec, Hewlett-Packard
The SV150 index of Silicon Valley's largest tech companies: Up 5.26, or 0.38 percent, to 1,404.9
The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index: Up 0.13 to 3,919.92
The blue chip Dow Jones industrial average: Down 32.43, or 0.21 percent, to 15,750.67
And the widely watched Standard & Poor's 500 index: Down 4.2, or 0.24 percent, to 1,767.69
Check in weekday afternoons for the 60-Second Business Break, a summary of news from Mercury News staff writers, The Associated Press, Bloomberg News and other wire services. Contact Jeremy C. Owens at 408-920-5876; follow him at Twitter.com/jowens510.
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