Apple's plan is probably to get Massimo to sell to them at a reasonable price I don't thing they want to license the tech. One of the rumoured changes to Apple Watch 10 is a new band that might work as part of the sensor system. So Apple stops the watch knowing they already have an alternative tech and stopping sales will increase sales for the Watch 10 when it comes out. Apple has the deep pockets to ride out lost watch sales for six months then Massimo walks away with nothing.
The plan is to pay Masimo zero dollars.
The ITC is forcing Apple's hand, and I bet a lot that Apple will just change a few Watch details that stops the Watches from violating the patent claims that the ITC thinks Apple violates, and gets them back into the USA market. Then, on to the next chapter with Masimo.
As Apple enters new markets, lawsuits will follow. If they add blood pressure monitoring, glucose monitoring, anything related to an existing market, to the Apple Watch, they will be sued for it. Same for cars. Same for the Vision Pro or successive VisionOS products.
Apple's plan is probably to get Massimo to sell to them at a reasonable price I don't thing they want to license the tech. One of the rumoured changes to Apple Watch 10 is a new band that might work as part of the sensor system. So Apple stops the watch knowing they already have an alternative tech and stopping sales will increase sales for the Watch 10 when it comes out. Apple has the deep pockets to ride out lost watch sales for six months then Massimo walks away with nothing.
The plan is to pay Masimo zero dollars.
The ITC is forcing Apple's hand, and I bet a lot that Apple will just change a few Watch details that stops the Watches from violating the patent claims that the ITC thinks Apple violates, and gets them back into the USA market. Then, on to the next chapter with Masimo.
As Apple enters new markets, lawsuits will follow. If they add blood pressure monitoring, glucose monitoring, anything related to an existing market, to the Apple Watch, they will be sued for it. Same for cars. Same for the Vision Pro or successive VisionOS products.
Burn the crops and salt the fields eh? Well, it's a proven power strategy. Well-received by the world of technology? Probably not.
Firstly, the ITC need to look at how all the other watchmakers, including all the cheap Chines knockoffs, are monitoring blood oxygen. If they infringe the same patents, then bans need to be implemented across the board. Too often, Apple is seen as an easy target for law suits, because they’re cashed up, but the ITC needs to ensure consistency in these matters.
Apple doesn’t like licensing/pay-per-purchase deals, as their volume of sales becomes a cash cow for other companies, and an open door for patent trolls. If this is determined to be a legitimate patent infringement, then Apple will need to work through the options.
That said, there are thousands of Apple patents that are infringed regularly. The whole Android OS I heavily infringes on Apple’s iPhone inventions (“and boy did we patent it” - Steve Jobs), so there needs to be consistency here. Do they ban every android device, not to mention all the other Chinese and Samsung copied products, from AirPods to laptops, that continue to be sold despite obvious copyright and patent violations.
In the short term, Apple could simply stop the alleged patent violations and simply “estimate” the blood oxygen, until they either come up with another sensor, or buy the patent. I would expect a software update to do this in the coming weeks, and a more long term fix in about a month.
Apple's plan is probably to get Massimo to sell to them at a reasonable price I don't thing they want to license the tech. One of the rumoured changes to Apple Watch 10 is a new band that might work as part of the sensor system. So Apple stops the watch knowing they already have an alternative tech and stopping sales will increase sales for the Watch 10 when it comes out. Apple has the deep pockets to ride out lost watch sales for six months then Massimo walks away with nothing.
The plan is to pay Masimo zero dollars.
The ITC is forcing Apple's hand, and I bet a lot that Apple will just change a few Watch details that stops the Watches from violating the patent claims that the ITC thinks Apple violates, and gets them back into the USA market. Then, on to the next chapter with Masimo.
As Apple enters new markets, lawsuits will follow. If they add blood pressure monitoring, glucose monitoring, anything related to an existing market, to the Apple Watch, they will be sued for it. Same for cars. Same for the Vision Pro or successive VisionOS products.
Burn the crops and salt the fields eh? Well, it's a proven power strategy. Well-received by the world of technology? Probably not.
I think "burning the crops" is a rather poor analogy for this. Any market under transition will have a period of litigation between incumbents and new entrants as the businesses are all under threat or trying to get a foothold. It takes a few years for the litigation to settle down to a detente. Masimo vs Apple is not even the start of the litigation war, probably just one of the initial movement of pieces before the real war starts.
Over the next 10 years or so, the health and medical equipment fields will be in a rather large transition. It's coming. The Watch is basically one of the first pieces of the transition, and you already see some health applications from it, but it is barely the tip of the iceberg. An AI chatbot "doctor" is coming, and will be able to prescribe medicines and procedures through images and video you feed it and the body data you provide it. Watches, rings, headphones, headsets can all provide body data. Personal devices that can do blood work from drops of blood as well as the class of devices that do it for vials of blood are going to be huge.
Really, I fully expect the "AI" doctor will be just as good as any doctor as long as it has the appropriate set of data, and if there is a device that provides by the hour blood and body characteristics? That company gets a big chunk of the market's revenue. All the existing medical equipment OEMs? Their market decreases. The medical specialists? Their number decreases. Devices that can measure characteristics of your body and health, their market exponentially increases. So like the dumb phone to smartphone transition, hundreds of billions is at stake, and the winners are going to be the companies good at AI and good at personal, consumer health devices.
Perhaps Masimo already sees that it is coming, is trying to protect their ground here and trying to get into the consumer market as soon as possible. Patents are just one of the instruments to get a foothold, and a lot of companies will use it.
A lot of forum patent threads have people arguing over and over about who steals from who and what not, and 99.9% of time, they don't even know what exactly is claimed to be the patent infringement, Even the podcasters (supposed journalists even) I listen to don't even spend 15 minutes figuring out what's going on. One of the reasons is that the patents are written so obtusely that people aren't going to spend the effort to understand what's going on. The patent lawyers and judges barely know what's what as the vagueness means different people will have different interpretations. That's really a sign that patents really aren't about protecting IP, at least in modern times, and they are instruments of negotiation and market positioning.
The hard part is the marketing and engineering. That's 99.9% of the job, not the whatever is in the patent. It is really doubtful any of that can be stolen. Any company that productizes an idea spends the same amount of resources on the engineering and trying to get into market, which are closely guarded trade secrets. The actual value. That's why I say Apple stole nothing from Masimo, and Apple likely spent more resources on the Apple Watch blood oxygen measurement feature than Masimo ever did on their devices, as Apple's scale and standards are quite large relative to other companies.
The hard part is the marketing and engineering. That's 99.9% of the job, not the whatever is in the patent. It is really doubtful any of that can be stolen. Any company that productizes an idea spends the same amount of resources on the engineering and trying to get into market, which are closely guarded trade secrets. The actual value. That's why I say Apple stole nothing from Masimo, and Apple likely spent more resources on the Apple Watch blood oxygen measurement feature than Masimo ever did on their devices, as Apple's scale and standards are quite large relative to other companies.
So Apple can steal any patented technolopgy from smaller companies because Apple has the marketing machine to sell much more products than these smaller companies. What a splendid concept. Never thought about that one.
Maybe you should patent this great concept.
But wait, ... Apple could just copy your concept for free because it has the big marketing machine. So don't bother
Apple should just buy Masimo and take their patents and shut them down. Problem solved!
Has to be a reason/ some reasons Tim et. al. hasn't done this. Wonder what it/they might be.
Might be cheaper in the long run versus a licensing deal. I know it may not be a popular solution for some but if it's the cheaper route in the end then why not?
50 million Apple Watches per year, if Masimo wanted $10 per unit, $500m/year. SE model doesn't have it so it will be less. They could restrict it to special models.
If Apple manages to avoid either, the cost is $0 so it's the most obvious route to exhaust first. This is just one watch component out of dozens, they can't go around spending billions buying companies for small features if they don't need to but Masimo might be able to offer more types of sensor and higher quality than they have and they generate over $1b/y in revenue.
It would be easier to leave the sensor out and make it a BTO option and pay the license for those. I doubt most buyers will bother about it. There was a test here of the feature vs medical grade equipment and it was to tell if people are breathing bad air:
What's the objection to sitting down at the table with Masimo and accepting their offer for a negotiation? Even the richest and most powerful of all companies should recognize when it's time to cut their losses, the lesson taken.
I just read what I believe is the patent. It doesn’t appear that Masimo has any patent on optical pulse ox technology, but combo of the sensor and the storing of sensor data in memory for later retrieval. I can see an argument for obviousness here.
What's the objection to sitting down at the table with Masimo and accepting their offer for a negotiation? Even the richest and most powerful of all companies should recognize when it's time to cut their losses, the lesson taken.
Acknowledging that one has done something wrong after denying it for so long is hard to do for individuals and corporations both. Even when the evidence says one did, in fact, do the wrong thing.
Assuming the evidence holds up for the next step of the process. A lot of people are assuming that the problem is "blood oxygen sensor". That's not the case. Masimo is alleging that their specific implementation of blood oxygen sensing is at the heart of Apple's device. If that allegation is in fact true, then Apple's refusal to settle (as they have so often done before) is puzzling, at least outside of pique. It's possible that they still think they're in the right, and are hoping that some pending appeal will exonerate them. I haven't been paying a huge amount of attention though, does Apple have any appeals left?
I suspect they have another implementation of blood oxygen sensing queued up for next year, but that still wouldn't let them off the hook for existing devices.
Firstly, the ITC need to look at how all the other watchmakers, including all the cheap Chines knockoffs, are monitoring blood oxygen. If they infringe the same patents, then bans need to be implemented across the board. Too often, Apple is seen as an easy target for law suits, because they’re cashed up, but the ITC needs to ensure consistency in these matters.
Apple doesn’t like licensing/pay-per-purchase deals, as their volume of sales becomes a cash cow for other companies, and an open door for patent trolls. If this is determined to be a legitimate patent infringement, then Apple will need to work through the options.
That said, there are thousands of Apple patents that are infringed regularly. The whole Android OS I heavily infringes on Apple’s iPhone inventions (“and boy did we patent it” - Steve Jobs), so there needs to be consistency here. Do they ban every android device, not to mention all the other Chinese and Samsung copied products, from AirPods to laptops, that continue to be sold despite obvious copyright and patent violations.
In the short term, Apple could simply stop the alleged patent violations and simply “estimate” the blood oxygen, until they either come up with another sensor, or buy the patent. I would expect a software update to do this in the coming weeks, and a more long term fix in about a month.
What makes you think that other companies are infringing? Evidence that they aren't. 1. Masimo has sued over this same tech before and won (against Philips). So why would they sue Apple and not Google/FitBit, Samsung, Withings, Oura, Garmin etc? Especially the smaller outfits that don't have Apple's infamous legal teams and resources. Start with the small fry, use them to establish precedent and that makes the case against Apple much easier. Instead, out of all the companies that offer SpO2 smartwatches Apple is the only one that they are suing. 2. Not only did Samsung clearly license the tech, but they partnered with Masimo for other products also: https://investor.masimo.com/news/news-details/2020/Masimo-and-Samsung-Partner-to-Package-Masimo-SafetyNet-with-Select-Samsung-Phones-to-Speed-COVID-19-Response-Efforts/default.aspx
As for Android, "the whole Android OS I heavily infringes on Apple’s iPhone inventions" is not true and never has been. The precedent was set with Apple versus Microsoft over Windows: that you can't patent general UX/UI concepts. And it was re-established again when Microsoft tried to go after various Linux desktops that copied Windows XP (these days they mostly copy macOS). Also, what was there to patent anyway? While it is fair to say that Apple invented touchscreen smartphones, Apple didn't invent the touchscreen, or even the handheld touchscreen device. Apple also didn't invent the app store concept. They also didn't invent the "icons on a home screen" layout. That leaves two things. A. the multitouch patent. This was made essentially worthless by this court ruling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_International (Apple patented multitouch in 2005 and the case that basically nullified it was filed in 2007) B. the pinch-to-zoom patent. Apple lost on this issue to Samsung in 2012. Keep in mind: Apple went from trying to get the ITC to ban Samsung Android devices unless Samsung agreed to a $50 per device licensing fee - which would have meant many tens of billions paid by Samsung to Apple annually and prevented Samsung from being able to sell budget Android devices entirely - to Samsung merely having to pay Apple a few hundred million over "trade dress." And Samsung only had to pay that because they literally left a paper trail on "let's copy Apple's trade dress." Had they not done this, they would have beaten Apple in court over that just as they did everything else. And it is also why Samsung is the only company that Apple ever successfully sued despite everyone copying Apple's designs, many even more closely. While the ~$500 million that Samsung paid Apple is nothing to sneeze at, compare that to the $8 billion that Samsung was stuck with to Microsoft over using the Windows filesystem (I think NFTS) in Android devices. Samsung eventually just turned that judgment into a cross-licensing deal.
What's the objection to sitting down at the table with Masimo and accepting their offer for a negotiation? Even the richest and most powerful of all companies should recognize when it's time to cut their losses, the lesson taken.
You don’t negotiate with terrorists.
In what world is Massimo a terrorist? They are an established company that has been developing pulse odometer technology for years.
I just read what I believe is the patent. It doesn’t appear that Masimo has any patent on optical pulse ox technology, but combo of the sensor and the storing of sensor data in memory for later retrieval. I can see an argument for obviousness here.
The basic concept for pulse oximetry has been around for decades. The advances have come in sensors and signal processing. Many areas in technology are obvious in hindsight but take a lot of research and trials to develop. Whether Massimo’s patent is an actual innovation or not is a question for the courts. I can say that clinically, their equipment is better than competitors’.
As for Android, "the whole Android OS I heavily infringes on Apple’s iPhone inventions" is not true and never has been.
Sorry, but I have to side with Steve Jobs on this one, that Android is stolen technology. The evidence is overwhelming that Samsung’s whole game plan was to blatantly copy (and infringe) Apple’s design and IP, as it was the only way to survive. And it worked for them. Regardless, there are countless other cheap Chinese knock offs that heavily infringe on Apple’s patents, but nothing is done about it as China is untouchable. And there’s no money in chasing these Chinese pop-ups. Apple, on the other hand, is held to a different standard, and it’s this hypocrisy and inconsistency that annoys me.
Comments
Two excellent posts. Detailed, explanatory, and rational.
The ITC is forcing Apple's hand, and I bet a lot that Apple will just change a few Watch details that stops the Watches from violating the patent claims that the ITC thinks Apple violates, and gets them back into the USA market. Then, on to the next chapter with Masimo.
As Apple enters new markets, lawsuits will follow. If they add blood pressure monitoring, glucose monitoring, anything related to an existing market, to the Apple Watch, they will be sued for it. Same for cars. Same for the Vision Pro or successive VisionOS products.
Over the next 10 years or so, the health and medical equipment fields will be in a rather large transition. It's coming. The Watch is basically one of the first pieces of the transition, and you already see some health applications from it, but it is barely the tip of the iceberg. An AI chatbot "doctor" is coming, and will be able to prescribe medicines and procedures through images and video you feed it and the body data you provide it. Watches, rings, headphones, headsets can all provide body data. Personal devices that can do blood work from drops of blood as well as the class of devices that do it for vials of blood are going to be huge.
Really, I fully expect the "AI" doctor will be just as good as any doctor as long as it has the appropriate set of data, and if there is a device that provides by the hour blood and body characteristics? That company gets a big chunk of the market's revenue. All the existing medical equipment OEMs? Their market decreases. The medical specialists? Their number decreases. Devices that can measure characteristics of your body and health, their market exponentially increases. So like the dumb phone to smartphone transition, hundreds of billions is at stake, and the winners are going to be the companies good at AI and good at personal, consumer health devices.
Perhaps Masimo already sees that it is coming, is trying to protect their ground here and trying to get into the consumer market as soon as possible. Patents are just one of the instruments to get a foothold, and a lot of companies will use it.
A lot of forum patent threads have people arguing over and over about who steals from who and what not, and 99.9% of time, they don't even know what exactly is claimed to be the patent infringement, Even the podcasters (supposed journalists even) I listen to don't even spend 15 minutes figuring out what's going on. One of the reasons is that the patents are written so obtusely that people aren't going to spend the effort to understand what's going on. The patent lawyers and judges barely know what's what as the vagueness means different people will have different interpretations. That's really a sign that patents really aren't about protecting IP, at least in modern times, and they are instruments of negotiation and market positioning.
The hard part is the marketing and engineering. That's 99.9% of the job, not the whatever is in the patent. It is really doubtful any of that can be stolen. Any company that productizes an idea spends the same amount of resources on the engineering and trying to get into market, which are closely guarded trade secrets. The actual value. That's why I say Apple stole nothing from Masimo, and Apple likely spent more resources on the Apple Watch blood oxygen measurement feature than Masimo ever did on their devices, as Apple's scale and standards are quite large relative to other companies.
SpO2 is not a small feature. It is what sets the series 9 apart from series 8
I suspect they have another implementation of blood oxygen sensing queued up for next year, but that still wouldn't let them off the hook for existing devices.
1. Masimo has sued over this same tech before and won (against Philips). So why would they sue Apple and not Google/FitBit, Samsung, Withings, Oura, Garmin etc? Especially the smaller outfits that don't have Apple's infamous legal teams and resources. Start with the small fry, use them to establish precedent and that makes the case against Apple much easier. Instead, out of all the companies that offer SpO2 smartwatches Apple is the only one that they are suing.
2. Not only did Samsung clearly license the tech, but they partnered with Masimo for other products also: https://investor.masimo.com/news/news-details/2020/Masimo-and-Samsung-Partner-to-Package-Masimo-SafetyNet-with-Select-Samsung-Phones-to-Speed-COVID-19-Response-Efforts/default.aspx
As for Android, "the whole Android OS I heavily infringes on Apple’s iPhone inventions" is not true and never has been. The precedent was set with Apple versus Microsoft over Windows: that you can't patent general UX/UI concepts. And it was re-established again when Microsoft tried to go after various Linux desktops that copied Windows XP (these days they mostly copy macOS). Also, what was there to patent anyway? While it is fair to say that Apple invented touchscreen smartphones, Apple didn't invent the touchscreen, or even the handheld touchscreen device. Apple also didn't invent the app store concept. They also didn't invent the "icons on a home screen" layout. That leaves two things.
A. the multitouch patent. This was made essentially worthless by this court ruling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_International (Apple patented multitouch in 2005 and the case that basically nullified it was filed in 2007)
B. the pinch-to-zoom patent. Apple lost on this issue to Samsung in 2012. Keep in mind: Apple went from trying to get the ITC to ban Samsung Android devices unless Samsung agreed to a $50 per device licensing fee - which would have meant many tens of billions paid by Samsung to Apple annually and prevented Samsung from being able to sell budget Android devices entirely - to Samsung merely having to pay Apple a few hundred million over "trade dress." And Samsung only had to pay that because they literally left a paper trail on "let's copy Apple's trade dress." Had they not done this, they would have beaten Apple in court over that just as they did everything else. And it is also why Samsung is the only company that Apple ever successfully sued despite everyone copying Apple's designs, many even more closely. While the ~$500 million that Samsung paid Apple is nothing to sneeze at, compare that to the $8 billion that Samsung was stuck with to Microsoft over using the Windows filesystem (I think NFTS) in Android devices. Samsung eventually just turned that judgment into a cross-licensing deal.
The basic concept for pulse oximetry has been around for decades. The advances have come in sensors and signal processing. Many areas in technology are obvious in hindsight but take a lot of research and trials to develop. Whether Massimo’s patent is an actual innovation or not is a question for the courts. I can say that clinically, their equipment is better than competitors’.