Apple-Qualcomm jury includes woman who’s never owned smartphone

A woman who has never owned a smartphone is among the nine jurors selected Monday to decide a multibillion-dollar dispute between Apple and Qualcomm over the technology used in iPhones.

The panel also includes a former Major League Baseball player turned air traffic controller, a retired psychologist and an environmental consultant.

Opening statements will start Tuesday in a San Diego trial over Apple’s claims that Qualcomm used its monopoly power as a maker of modem chips for mobile phones to extract excessive patent royalties from phone makers. Qualcomm, in turn, is seeking billions of dollars in unpaid royalties from Apple’s Asian contractors that assemble its iPhones and iPads.

During jury selection, US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel quizzed the former baseball player, identified only as Juror No. 9, about a proposed class-action lawsuit over pay for minor league players that would have included him. The ex-player said that case wasn’t certified to go forward as a class action and that he never thought it would go anywhere.

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The prospective jurors who didn’t make it on the panel included a retired employment lawyer, a man who volunteered that he didn’t like the direction Apple had been going, and a “private fiduciary.”