Apple Again Banned From Selling Watches In US With Blood Oxygen Sensor (cnbc.com) 75
A U.S. Court of Appeals said Apple will again be barred from selling the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 beginning Thursday. These models both contain a blood oxygen sensor that infringes on the intellectual property of medical device company Masimo.
"The court order Wednesday did not rule on Apple's effort to overturn a U.S. International Trade Commission ban on the company selling the affected watches in the United States," notes CNBC. "But it lifted an injunction that had blocked the ban from taking effect while that appeal is pending." From the report: In December, Apple chose to briefly remove the affected watches from its online and retail stores, though retailers with those devices in stock may still sell them. Earlier this week, court filings suggested that Apple had received approval from U.S. Customs for a modified version of its Apple Watches that lack the blood oxygen feature and therefore no longer infringe on Masimo's intellectual property. It could open a path for a modified Apple Watch to return to U.S. store shelves.
"The court order Wednesday did not rule on Apple's effort to overturn a U.S. International Trade Commission ban on the company selling the affected watches in the United States," notes CNBC. "But it lifted an injunction that had blocked the ban from taking effect while that appeal is pending." From the report: In December, Apple chose to briefly remove the affected watches from its online and retail stores, though retailers with those devices in stock may still sell them. Earlier this week, court filings suggested that Apple had received approval from U.S. Customs for a modified version of its Apple Watches that lack the blood oxygen feature and therefore no longer infringe on Masimo's intellectual property. It could open a path for a modified Apple Watch to return to U.S. store shelves.
Ask a stupid question: (Score:2)
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Fair play. I don't understand why its prohibited anyway.
Re:Ask a stupid question: (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd guess it's because the patent is on the hardware so even if it doesn't display the blood oxygen level it's still infringing on the patent
Re:Ask a stupid question: (Score:4, Interesting)
No, what happened was Apple applied for a temporary injunction after Christmas to block the ITC order blocking importation of Apple Watches.
What happened now is that temporary injunction has failed and Apple Watches are now banned from importation.
Nothing else has happened - ever notice how Apple was making big noise about Apple Watches being banned during the holiday season? Then after that, nothing, and even after this, nothing as well.
It's pure marketing spin going on - Apple knew the ban will happen on Christmas, thus why not goose Apple Watch sales by announcing they will be banned on Christmas and getting people to buy Apple Watches rather than other gifts (even Apple Gift Cards). The temporary injunction just made it so if you got a gift card to buy an Apple Watch, hey, you had a chance still, but that's it.
Apple's sales during the last quarter are always high. Apple's sales during the first quarter of the year are generally very low. As far as Apple is concerned, they milked the ban to get many extra sales they otherwise wouldn't have, and now the ban is in effect, hey, it's not going to hurt us too badly anymore. We now have a couple of quarters to update the software so sales can resume in the second half of the year when they start picking up again.
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That's great, but why do say "no" and "nothing else has happened"? None of your post has anything to do with the conversation where the parent was replying to the OP on why Apple doesn't just block the sensor in software.
Your post would have been better placed on it's own with its own title, you don't need to disagree with someone (or pretend to since you're not actually refuting anything in this thread) to post on Slashdot.
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No, this is simply bad reporting. Other reporting describes accurately what happened: they disabled the feature, nothing more, which Masimo and the ITC say is sufficient for the time being. The hardware is still in the devices and can presumably be re-enabled later if Apple reaches an agreement with Masimo or prevails in the courts.
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I'd guess it's because the patent is on the hardware so even if it doesn't display the blood oxygen level it's still infringing on the patent
This has nothing to do with Patents; but rather "Trade Secrets" and "Poaching".
It's a bullshit ruling in a bullshit case.
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Ah well that's dumb then
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Re: Ask a stupid question: (Score:2)
this puts Apple on the defensive
Now the shoe's on the other foot. And if you'll pardon the pun,"How do you like *them* apples?"
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How does an LED (which is what it effectively is) infringe on the patent. All Apple has to do is declare it as something else. You can read all about their technology on their website, all the stuff happens in signal filtering software. It's effectively a software patent (which Apple got previous Masimo patents disqualified) "in a watch".
So now we have to sit through the stupid shit that happens every few years of obvious technology "on a computer", "on the Internet", "on the phone" but now for "on a watch"
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Apple pulling them off the market let's you know the truth. I was going to ask the same question as the person you responded to, not fitbit specifically but there are tons of other manufacturers that have oxygen sensors in their watches/fitness monitors/whatever.
My fitbit died and I deleted the account since it's google now and you can't add another one without linking a gmail account. If you look at the fitbit charge 6 which is their current gen you'll see fuckloads of unhappy former fitbit customers on
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was quite happy with my Fitbit Charge 2, the 1½ year it worked it gave up, tried Apple watch, wanted to go back to Fitbit but when Google bought them, that was out of the question. :/
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It's a software patent "on a watch". Also Fitbit didn't have a ton of money as wearables were a bit of a joke until Google took them over and then Apple jumped on board and Masimo which is a massive patent troll thought the Apple Watch would have the iPod/iPhone momentum.
However, Masimo has already lost 3 previous court cases on the subject (for previous watches), it's only after the Masimo bribed, I mean donated, millions to certain government officials and their CEO became an advisor in the current White
Gimmick (Score:3)
Re:Gimmick (Score:5, Insightful)
So it's a feature most people would never use, let alone need.
You could also say that about the heart arrhythmia detection. Or the fall detection. They'll never be used by the majority of watch owners, so why include them?
Heck, why include an alarm on a car? Most cars never get stolen...
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No VO2 max isn't measurable via blood oxygen detection. Your fitness band will use your heartrate variation related to pace and stride length to measure VO2 max.
That said on the apple watch I believe the same sensor is used for measuring heartrate as SpO2 so you can still be glad it's not disabled in software :-)
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This is, after all, a timeline featuring a widespread respiratory virus. On the other hand, Google tells me most medical sources are unenthusiastic about pulse oximeters in general.
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So it's a feature most people would never use, let alone need.
You could also say that about the heart arrhythmia detection. Or the fall detection. They'll never be used by the majority of watch owners, so why include them?
Heck, why include an alarm on a car? Most cars never get stolen...
Manufacturers have started not including alarms on cars because they're malfunctioning more often than they're preventing theft... and they don't malfunction that often.
With things like the Apple Watch, they're trying to justify it's existence by trying to claim it can do everything under the sun but isn't actually very good at any of it. If you need to monitor your blood oxygen concentration you'll have a device that is certified to do it accurately, usually it ends up being a single use device. Same wi
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There are things like "sleep apneue" google it, I don't know how to spell it.
It is related to snoring.
People are suffocating in theire sleep and wake with a panic attack.
A smart watch that triggers a specific vibration alarm, which you have trained to notice, and make you tourn over to your side, avoids waking you up.
Much much better sleep.
There are plenty of other medical cases. Like for elderly, calling an ambulance automatically when they collapse and breath irregularly.
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Why do people need to monitor their blood oxygen levels on a daily basis? A healthy adult at sea level would normally have a blood oxygen level in the 98% range
You are healthy until you're not. The ability to rack your SpO2 gives you an insight into emerging problems that you may not have had. There are plenty of people who have identified the need to go and get checked for something such as obstructive sleep apnoea based on SpO2 data indicating they were having oxygenation issues while they sleep.
Day to day, walking the streets of New York, your levels would never change.
Of course they could, in fact we only recently experienced a pandemic which induced a drastic change in people's SpO2 data even if they were walking on the street. You c
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It's a gimmick anyway. Why do people need to monitor their blood oxygen levels on a daily basis? A healthy adult at sea level would normally have a blood oxygen level in the 98% range. Only if you are in poor health with breathing issues would your blood oxygen level be lower. The other time I can think of where your blood oxygen levels would matter, is if you were at high altitude (climbing a mountain above 3000m) where the air is thinner so your blood oxygen levels would drop. Day to day, walking the streets of New York, your levels would never change. So it's a feature most people would never use, let alone need.
A normal person wouldn't ever care. But distance runners, cyclers, swimmers, etc. They care. There's a techno-race in those circles to try to monitor every little thing in the body to maximize potential. I personally never got too deep into it, but some of the folks I ride with in the summer have heart monitors, bloodox meters, thermometers on various muscles. I swear, one dude looked like a cyborg when he showed up for a ride last summer he had so much crap on him. Not even sure where the fun would be at t
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I don't have an apple watch, but I do have a smart watch (with blood oxygen monitor) - we also have one of those clip on ones you put your finger in. They don't agree at all - apparently a healthy adult should be at about 99% most of the time - which the clip on one says, but the watch says 96%. When I had early covid, the clip did get me down to 96%, goodness knows what the watch would say. I'd trust the clip thing more than the watch.
It's maybe useful for seeing if it drops or changes or whatever, but oth
Apple should just buy them out (Score:1)
Morality aside, if I were Apple, I'd just buy Masimo outright, and fire the top non-tech layer of management to send a message. Apple is roughly 50x bigger than Masimo. Eatem!
Granted, many of the top managers of Masimo would probably get reimbursed handsomely from the sale.
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Morality aside, if I were Apple, I'd just buy Masimo outright, and fire the top non-tech layer of management to send a message. Apple is roughly 50x bigger than Masimo. Eatem!
Granted, many of the top managers of Masimo would probably get reimbursed handsomely from the sale.
Probably what they are trying to achieve.
Re:Apple should just buy them out (Score:5, Informative)
Morality aside, if I were Apple, I'd just buy Masimo outright, and fire the top non-tech layer of management to send a message. Apple is roughly 50x bigger than Masimo. Eatem!
Granted, many of the top managers of Masimo would probably get reimbursed handsomely from the sale.
Probably what they are trying to achieve.
That's precisely what Apple didn't try to do. They hired away two executives from Masimo doubling their saleries. Those two Masimo PHBs then set about recruiting key employees to join Apple and take with them Masimo's trade secrets. Apple executives referred to this activity as 'smart recruiting' in internal e-mails: https://www.latimes.com/busine... [latimes.com]. I think that Apple's initial idea may have been to show up, make the owners of Masimo 'an offer they could not refuse'. When that failed for whatever reason their next thought seems to have been just to poach the employees to get the trade secrets and that this issue would be settled out of court once they had presented Masimo with 'facts on the ground' and that this would be even cheaper than just acquiring Masimo as you suggest. It would of course have to be because obviously you'll want to send a message and create a suitable deterrent to any other small company that doesn't just roll over and make way for the behemoth' when it makes an offer you can't refuse that if you don't take that offer you get less in a settlement. But Apple miscalculated. According to that LA Times article, the guy who runs Masimo isn't the settling out of court type of person, he has already forked over USD 60 million in legal costs bringing this lawsuit and expects to spend at least that much again in legal costs before this is over. Apple is probably going to bring this before the SCOTUS if they can if for no other reason than to drive up the legal bill as yet another in an arsenal of deterrents to other small businesses whose trade secrets it decides to steal. This just comes to show that when politicians tell you that you can always seek justice in the courts they are literally full of shit and this is not just a US problem. Whatever the courts in most countries were originally designed to do, today, in many countries, they have become an instrument of extortion designed primarily for the wealthy to use to extort the less wealthy who cannot afford to spend tens and hundreds of millions of dollars on lawsuits. The less wealthy you are the more egregiously you can be abused by anybody with deep pockets. Things like the loser-pays and fines for extortion motivated lawsuits help but only if the fines are calibrated to really hurt the wealthy and corporate abusers and that means fines calculated as a significant proportion of their revenues they report to their investors and shareholders before the application of 'Hollywood accounting' for tax purposes.
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If I cared even the tiniest amount about a company I run, it would never be sold to Apple no matter how much money they offered. That's like selling your only cow because the customer wants the milk, instead of just selling the milk. And then the customer kills the cow within a week trying to make it more efficient.
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I'll sell them my entire company for their entire company. Only offer.
Re:Apple should just buy them out (Score:4, Insightful)
I really doubt Apple wants to get into the regulated healthcare industry and be on the hook for all that hospital tech Masimo sells.
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You would buy an exchange listed multinational medical company? Aside from anything else the direct cost of the stock would be like 10 billion. To fire all management? The ones that you just gave a big payout to their held stock and are now giving a golden handshake by firing them?
What's the message? 'we will pay you handsomely if you attack us' or so?
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Apple could sell off the parts of the org it doesn't need.
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(*)remember kids, the ITC is neither a court nor does it decide whether a patent is valid
Not an Apple fanbois, but I hope they win (Score:1, Interesting)
Before his legal action, employees and friends warned Kiani of the risks of doing so against such a major opponent. "People were telling me I'm crazy and I can't go against Apple," Kiani said, with Apple described as having "unlimited resources." Even so, with Apple's previous history of dealing with patent violation allegations from smaller companies, Kiani thinks he can make a difference in their favor. "No-one is standing up to them. If I can do it, it might change Apple for the better," he said.
The battles picked by Kiani are protracted but lucrative to Masimo. In one seven-year patent fight with Nellcor that ended in 2006, Masimo secured damages and royalties that eventually totaled close to $800 million.
Meanwhile another seven-year patent infringement spat against Royal Philips which settled in 2016 saw Philips pay $300 million and agree to use Masimo's technology in its product. That move earned Masimo in excess of $1 billion.
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Even so, with Apple's previous history of dealing with patent violation allegations from smaller companies, Kiani thinks he can make a difference in their favor. "No-one is standing up to them. If I can do it, it might change Apple for the better," he said.
No chance of it changing Apple for the better, but good on him for standing up to them anyway.
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Re:Not an Apple fanbois, but I hope they win (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not an Apple fanbois, but I hope they win (Score:4, Insightful)
you sure sound like an Apple fanboi. Apple have done everything they can to screw over Masimo from poaching staff to get the tech to refusing to even negotiate a license and even when they lost the court gave them a space of time to come to a deal and instead Apple used the time to try and get the Government to overturn the ruling. At no point does Apple appear to have even tried to do the right thing.
This, if any party is guilty of patent trolling it's Apple. Nice to see them get a dose of their own medicine.
Re:Not an Apple fanbois, but I hope they win (Score:5, Informative)
To be a patent troll they would have to have either worthless/questionable patents, or have bought those patents for the purpose of suing people for infringement.
Masimo developed the technology in-house. You can argue that patent law is broken, but Masimo is using it as intended - to protect something they invested R&D time and money into. The patents have been examined and found to be valid, i.e. no prior art and not obvious.
Apple pretty brazenly stole the tech too. They targeted Masimo staff who had developed it, and paid them to reproduce that work at Apple. It's not as if Apple developed the same thing in parallel, had the same idea. They saw what Masimo had and tried to take it.
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As I pointed out, the patent is not obvious or "on a phone". They don't even make phones, they make medical equipment.
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Re:Not an Apple fanbois, but I hope they win (Score:5, Informative)
but Masimo sounds very much like a patent troll to me...
A company that actually invested R&D, and develops and markets medical products based on the patent is by definition not a patent troll. Just because you sue someone who is stealing your work, work which you do openly license to 3rd parties, doesn't make you a troll. That's not what that word means.
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The philosophical discussion that interests me is - when is leveraging someone else's work as inspiration stealing versus just using it for inspiration?
I can't imagine Apple directly copied the tech; if they didn't at least try to modify it enough to think they worked around the patent claims then I think they do deserve the consequences.
But if they tried to make a different implementation to get the same effect and still can't get around the patent claims, that suggests the patent is indeed far too broad:
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They literally poached employees from Masimo with what appears to be the intention of acquiring trade secrets.
"Marcelo Lamego was only at Apple for six months, but he filed for 12 patents in that time and was named as an inventor on several future Apple patents. He worked on the same kind of sensor that he had worked on at Masimo, which Masimo has taken issue with. Lamego was hired at the recommendation of Michael O'Reilly (former Chief Medical Officer at Masimo), who at the time warned Apple that "most of
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The philosophical discussion that interests me is - when is leveraging someone else's work as inspiration stealing versus just using it for inspiration?
I can't imagine Apple directly copied the tech; if they didn't at least try to modify it enough to think they worked around the patent claims then I think they do deserve the consequences.
that's just it, not only did apple copy it, they actually poached the staff from masimo to create the copy.
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I can't imagine Apple directly copied the tech;
You don't need to imagine anything. That's the job of the courts and they have ruled on it already.
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Re:Not an Apple fanbois, but I hope they win (Score:5, Insightful)
>but Masimo sounds very much like a patent troll to me...
They have a patent. They developed it, they didn't buy it. They have a product, that they sell - a watch, in fact with the O2 sensor. Their patent is apparently valid.
How is any way is that a patent troll?
funny that (Score:2)
shouldn't apple just buy Massimo out and be done with it ?
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Poor little rich boy (Score:1)
Company develops tech that Apple thinks would be nifty in its watches.
Billions in liquid cash reserves yet they steal it (probably convinced themselves it passed the "obvious test".
Little guy is so pissed he stakes his personal fortune on standing up for himself and the courts agree - Apple was naughty and should not profit off their banditry.
Apple cries in beer "it ain't fair" and rather than come to an agreement with the little guy, they throw a tantrum and throw out the tech.
Apple is so fucking cheap and