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Apple Hit With $634 Million Verdict in Apple Watch Blood Oxygen Patent Lawsuit
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Apple 🍎 doesn’t care about it being cheaper as they have the best Lawyers on earth. The ball is in Apple’s court as they will litigate this until the patent expires in 2028, then Apple 🍎 will be the last one laughing 😆
This is one of those few cases where Apple deserves the blame. They stole from a professional medical device company and copied the technology instead of licensing it.
Scammy way to run a company.
Scammy way to run a company.
Business as usual for Apple. They make a calculated decision on whether developing the technology, licensing the technology, or simply violating an existing patent is the cheapest path, then they attempt to crush the patent holder with endless appeals and legal fees.
Big deal. Apple will appeal again and again until Massimo settles b/c they ran out of money for torts.
$634m + 211 =$845m
combine with avg cost to build Apple Watch goes up by $10 which, assuming 30% margins off of watch. assume ASP $350, that's $105 profit.
assume 30 million watches sold per year (Apple Watch on a decline)
to keep Apple's 30% margin, each Apple Watch would need to increase by $35 for the next 2 years to payback patent fee, lawyers, and the ongoing patent license at $10 per unit and to account minimal price elasticity (even you think the watch isn't worth the price increase)
I don't see anywhere where there was a defence of Apple. More like comical observations, which was exactly the point that you missed.
Seems like a pretty big stretch to infer that based on someone's comical observations.
Absolute nonsense. The have active products using the technology that they developed. Pretty sure Apple is the one at fault here.
What's with people taking Apple's side as if Masimo is a patent troll (definition: a patent holding company that doesn't make anything)
634 million is peanuts compared to what Apple spent on the iPhone Air Flop and AVP!
Masimo's patent related to the Apple Watch is set to expire in August 2028. At this point Miasimo is just a patent troll milking every dollar they can while the getting is good… 😉
I was working in Development for a company in the 1980s that used pulses of infrared light to measure the relative proportions of certain chemicals in a material. Aren't the Masimo patents all about doing the same thing with a wearable device and minimising extraneous signals? The patent system has a very low bar.
Your characterization of the damage-limitation argument as Apple's primary defense is misleading.
Apple DOES NOT argue that they are allowed to use Masimo's patent because they are a consumer device. What you said above is patently (pun intended) false.
Apple claims to not be a patient monitor only as a contingent defense should their primary defense be rejected. This is done to limit the scope of damages. It is essentially the same thing as if you are being sued for battery, you might simultaneously claim "I did not commit battery" and "Even if I did, you cannot claim bruising your arm requires you to buy a new car". The secondary defense against the expansiveness of damage claims cannot be construed as an admission of infringement.
Apple's primary defense argument is that they do not infringe the patent; they do monitoring in a different way. They use a different LED topology, different wavelengths of light, different rejection strategies for ambient light, different optical isolation mechanics, different tissue modeling, different algorithms, proprietary DSP pipelines, as well as other substantial differences. Their tech is different architecturally, optically, electronically, and algorithmically.
Unfortunately for Apple, the patent courts are not about truth. They are simply about settling disputes. Apple's defense gets evaluated by people who have little to no technical qualifications to make such decisions. Neither the judges in the ITC case, nor citizen juries are technically competent. They get swayed by narrative, obfuscation, rhetoric, emotion, credibility heuristics, and cognitive biases–the same way as people do on this forum.
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I don't think Apple really wants to be a medical device company. The cost and hassle of getting medical equipment through regulatory approval would require Apple to significantly reorganize its engineering, quality-assurance, documentation, and compliance practices (or run parallel organization, which would be cost inefficient and cause internal friction). It would also complicate and confuse their brand identity. Though it might be funny to see an ad for the Apple watch that includes 20-seconds of pharmaceutical-company-level disclaimers at the end.
Because it's a bad faith observation and branding any defiance of Apple as a "apple hater" is defense. It's okay to want them to pay for damages and also not pass the cost to the consumer. Sorry if that's hard for you to understand. Would you like further explanation or do you understand now?
I think I read that they wanted $100/watch as a licensing fee.
1. Apple's technology does not infringe based on architecture, optics, electronics, and algorithm.
2. Masimo had no competing product and no intention to compete with Apple until several years after Apple included oximetry into the Apple Watch Series 6. Masimo was found guilty of violating Apple Watch patents. To me, this shows bad faith on Masimo's part.
3. Masimo may have tech and be a solid actor in the medical space, but in their prosecution of this patent against Apple, they are acting like a patent troll.
There's nothing bad faith about it; the only bad faith is your insistence in attempting to infer a motivation that you can neither know nor prove. One could equally comment only on "Apple fan boys"; it doesn't mean you agree with the statements only that they are funny. You misconstrue agreement with the perspective and intent, as I said before. You still seem unable to reconcile the fact that many people make statements that they can also disagree with. This is part what makes it funny.
That's not what a patent troll is.
and because it expires in five years they're supposed to just let anyone use the technology they developed and patented? That doesn't make sense.
I'm sure apple would react the same way in kind
