I doubt that. Eight figures is probably enough to for Apple to pay in house legal staff to stay locked in slow motion litigation with this guy for the rest of his life (or at least until he's exhausted his own financial ability to litigate).
This changes the whole game not in favor of Apple. And adds few zeros to the cost for Apple to try to wiggle out of this clean and not admit racist bias.
Welcome to america.
The white guy would get $10 off apple store offer from apple if he was lucky.
> stay locked in slow motion litigation with this guy for the rest of his life (or at least until he's exhausted his own financial ability to litigate)
How is this even possible? Why don't judges recognize this obvious abuse and stop it?
Recognize? Probably. But it's easy for courts to come procedure bound and even feel like they're doing you a favor, e.g. "I gotta do this by the book so its not overturned on appeal."
They key probably isn't litigation, but more stories like this that paint Apple as having bad technology and/or racist employees...even if that's not exactly what happened.
Companies, police and politicians always freak out when someone doesn't want money, but just want them to admit to doing something wrong. Getting a $1Mill is easier than getting an apology.
Getting a fake apology is easy, getting actual admission of wrongdoing is hard. The former is embarrassing, the latter can be used as evidence in later lawsuits. This is precisely the reason why criminal prosecutions of companies result in the company admitting no wrong but coincidentally agreeing to a 8 to 9 digit fine.
I think the difference is between a fake "We are sorry you feel this way" and a real "we messed up big time on this. For starters, here's what we will do to make sure it doesn't happen again".
Well of course. Getting the state to admit it was in the wrong is a precursor to get the state to stop doing something and the state absolutely hates giving up power.
Doubtful. The maximum damages that a court would likely find for the defendant -- even if Apple admitted all the allegations -- would be much, much smaller than that. (Consider that even wrongful death settlements or injury settlements are at most a few million; and this alleged victim's injuries were only reputational.) Settlements often boil down to a fraction of the maximum theoretical damages, so I expect the value to be in the 5 figures at most.