According to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Apple has made a major push to recruit talent from the electric carmaker, offering massive bonuses and significant salary bumps for those willing to come to work in Cupertino.

The faster time to market for Samsung's 14nm process as well as potentially slightly bigger performance or power consumption benefits on TSMC's 16nm process must have convinced Apple that it's worth going back to Samsung.

During Apple's quarterly conference call on Tuesday, CEO Tim Cook said Apple Watch development is on track and expects to launch the device in April, coming in just under the company's "early 2015" promise.

Taiwan's Foxconn Technology Group, the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer, will cut its massive workforce, the company told Reuters, as the Apple supplier faces declining revenue growth and rising wages in China.

Steve Jobs shunned trips to Washington, D.C., during his tenure as Apple CEO, but Tim Cook has been a frequent visitor to Capitol Hill to personally amp up Apple's lobbying efforts, which have more than doubled since 2009.

Lee Don-tae, former co-president of UK design consulting firm Tangerine, founded by Apple's Jony Ive, has been hired by Samsung Electronics as its new head of global design.

Four Silicon Valley companies including Apple and Google have agreed to a new settlement that would resolve an antitrust class action lawsuit by tech workers, who accused the firms of conspiring to avoid poaching each other's employees.

Among the top winners of US patents in 2014, Google cracked the top 10 for the first time, hitting No. 8 with 2,566 patents, up a whopping 38.6% from last year. Archrival Apple won 2,003 patents, up 12.8% to 11th place, just 92 patents behind Panasonic, which fell for the second consecutive year.

Before the Apple Watch hits the market early this year, a Chinese company was at this week's CES selling a knock-off version of the highly anticipated wearable for less than one-tenth of the price.

The settlement of China's anti-trust probe into Qualcomm is likely to intensify global scrutiny of the firm's highly profitable patent licensing business, and may even call into question its worldwide contracts with smartphone makers such as Apple and Samsung.

Poor treatment of workers in Chinese factories which make Apple products has been discovered by an undercover BBC Panorama investigation.

Technology giant Apple says it cannot sell products online in Russia because the rouble's value is too volatile for it to set prices.

A story that Apple tried for three weeks to suppress is now part of the public record.

Apple is planning to push its Beats streaming music service to every iPhone in the new year, according to a report in the Financial Times newspaper.

Korea Times is claiming that a deal has been struck with Apple for Samsung to supply 80% of the chips for next year's iPhones and iPads, with TSMC picking up the balance of orders.

A California judge has ruled that a former iPhone user can sue Apple for damages after she found that she would no longer be able to receive Apple iMessage text messages once she switched from an iPhone 4 to an Android smartphone.

According to industry sources, Apple has decided to discontinue its use of triple-level cell (TLC) NAND, since the company believes that the functional defects plaguing the 64GB iPhone 6 and the 128GB iPhone 6+ stem from a problem in the controller IC of the TLC NAND flash. The controller IC in question is reportedly made by SSD maker Anobit, which was sold to Apple in 2011.

New smartphone releases and an increased emphasis on emerging markets drove global smartphone shipments above 300 million units for the second consecutive quarter.

Korean manufacturers' smartphone exports dropped by 35.5% year-on-year in October 2014 due to the release of Apple's iPhone 6 and a rapid sales decline in China and the ASEAN region.