Most of this articles seems to be about the money Masimo makes out of patent settlements. Is Masimo a serious company or is it a patent troll that keeps up a charade of selling medical products.

To research that I checked Amazon.

• Their Masimo MightySat Fingertip Pulse Oximeter currently sells for $269.99. It has a 4.5 star rating and has sold a mere 50+ in the past month. That's not much business for a company that's spending $100 million on lawyers. They have no business to save worth speaking of.
• A similar looking Innovo Deluxe Fingertip Pulse Oximeter has a slightly better 4.7 star rating, sells for $34.99 and has sold 5K+ in the past month. Indeed, Amazon has page after page filled with pulse oximeters selling for between $25 and $45. Masimo's is such a far outliner I could not find another even close to its price.

What's really odd is when I had Amazon display pulse oximeters priced from high to low, the Masimo did not even appear. The most expensive one displayed is from Zacurate at $44.99. I've been told by people at Amazon that its search results aren't literally accurate, that some items aren't displayed for reasons known only to Amazon. I suspect Amazon considers the Masimo so grossly overpriced, it doesn't bother to list it in some search results. In fact when I searched for Masimo pulse oximeter by name, it only came up fifth. 

Also, there's nothing remarkable about Masimo's product even though it sells for about six times the market price. Accuracy certainly isn't a factor. It's displays two digits on a tiny display just like all the other products, that's a 1% accuracy, which is fine for that purpose. There's also deception in this claim. 

• Clinically Proven Technology: Powered by Masimo SET, the same technology used by 9 of the top 10 US hospitals and is used to monitor more than 200 Million patients annually.

Yeah, that "same technology" is not only used by "top hospitals," it's almost certainly used in these inexpensive home ones. That's where that 200 million figure comes from for a country with about 330 million people.  It would not surprise me if it was being made in the same Chinese factories that make those $25 pulse oximeters. It looks much the same.

I've been known to criticize Apple's business tactics, but in this case I'm on Apple's side. They're battling a dishonest patent troll that sells overpriced sham products. I wish them every success.

Separately, however, India's government did previously attack Apple over its similar warnings in October 2023. In that case, the warnings chiefly went to journalists and opposition politicians in the country.

Apple has a habit of repeating its mistakes. It went into and stayed in China's despite its repressive regime. Finally seeing the necessity of reducing its dependence on China, it moves. But where does it move to? To India, which while better still has serious problems.

While India is a multiparty democracy, the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has presided over discriminatory policies and a rise in persecution affecting the Muslim population. The constitution guarantees civil liberties including freedom of expression and freedom of religion, but harassment of journalists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and other government critics has increased significantly under Modi. The BJP has increasingly used government institutions to target political opponents. Muslims, scheduled castes (Dalits), and scheduled tribes (Adivasis) remain economically and socially marginalized. —Freedom House
https://freedomhouse.org/country/india/freedom-world/2023

There are practical reasons why Amazon might have deferred posting the cost of tariffs.

(1). The tariff rates keep jumping around, depending on Trump's whims. Constant revisions of those figures could get expensive.

(2) Some of what's being sold is pre-tariff stock. How can the pre- and post-costs be merged? No practical way.

(3) Unpredictable future tariffs and costs may lead some to raise prices in anticipation of what may come. Better to lose sales than lose money on sales.

Those concerned about getting a ball-park figure about the increases might check out Camelcamelcamel.com. It keeps a historic record of Amazon prices that'll allow rough before and after comparisons.

Apple's lawyers and those of its Silicon Valley neighbors do not impress. When you're fighting an opponent with the size and reach of the EU, you need to be careful not to leave any legal loose ends lying about. They will come around to bite.

That's why I took care when I settled a copyright dispute with one of the largest literary estates on the planet represented near the last by one of the top one-hundred largest law firms in the U.S. Yes, I'd won handily. My opponents bailed out rather than risk losing on concurrent motions for summary judgment. They told the judge they'll settle out of court. Shortly after, the federal judge gave me a final victory up by dismissing their suit "with prejudice." That meant that the estate could never bring it up again. I'd won on the merits, a powerful fair-use argument I transformed into literary commentary for the closing chapter of my contested book, Untangling Tolkien. But I took an additional precautions. I negotiated a written settlement that removed all doubt and left me free to publish unhindered by them under any circumstances. 

Apple (and I suspect the rest) are taking the opposite tack, pushing back against the law and the ruling in an effort to see how much they can get away with. If they had a scrap of sense, they would have followed up this court decision by a written settlement that specified just what they could and could not do. By not doing that, they're facing yet another clash with the EU, In addition, they're facing additional disputes with the DOJ in the U.S. along with lawsuits from the AGs in at least 12 states and civil disputes that are popping up all over.

If this was a Western movie, a flock of hungry vultures would have begun to circle over their heads signaling yet more trouble to come.

$50 million a season with ten episodes seems like quite a bargain compared to what Amazon spent for the first season of "The Rings of Power." That $50 million for a season wouldn't even cover a single episode of the latter.

Accounting for just the production budget of $465 million, when spread over The Rings of Power’s eight episodes, it results in a cost per episode of $58.1 million. But if we include purchasing the rights on top of that, it equates to a jaw-dropping $89.4 million per episode. In both instances, it makes The Rings of Power the most expensive TV show ever made and by some margin.

https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2022/09/01/the-rings-of-power-cost-per-episode-budget-most-expensive-tv-show/

There are almost always ways to work around censorship.

Here's RFE's home page: https://about.rferl.org/service/russian-service/

Here's RFE's suggestions for getting around blocking: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-censorship-vpn-reporting/31737775.html

If what you need is an equivalent of Adobe's Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator, check out what Affinity offers. One option is apps for all platforms—Mac, Windows and iPad—for a one-time payment of $164.99. No subscription cost. That's about what Adobe charges for a couple of months rent.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

A few years back when I exited Adobe's subscription trap, I felt like joining this choir and celebrating.

The 22-year-old woman, who uses the social handle "Meatball," has been held for court on charges that include burglary, conspiracy, and criminal trespass, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Her video included footage of people stealing from the Apple Store and slamming iPhones to the ground once they realized the items were bricked.

Hopefully she'd be at least 32 before she walks out of the slammer. The way to end these big city looting sprees is to start imposing sufficiently long sentences. 

Also, can you imagine the stupidity of thieves so ill-informed they don't know that stolen iPhones get bricked and so anti-social that they then smash them. You and I pay more for everything we buy from food to iPhones because these people are walking free rather than doing time.

Whizville said:

What the author of this article seems to gloss over that the iPod was discontinued because the iPhone did everything and iPod does and more. 

That's exactly my experience. I quit buying iPods when I realized that I could get a used iPhone that did everything an iPod did and more for less money.

Please excuse the large bold type. I do this because I suspect I'm not the only one who has trouble reading tiny font that's the default font for posts.

----

iPhones made in the U.S.? Trump spent his business career shilling for casinos and luxury condos with his name on them. He knows nothing about modern manufacturing, particularly that of high-tech items. They're made all over the world and the final assembly. which earns the "Made in the U.S." label, is a trivia process, as anyone who'd watched an iFixit tear-down video knows. It is dull, repetitive work that doesn't earn those who do it much money. Getting all hot and bothered about bringing it here is ridiculous.

We can contrast Trump with Ronald Reagan. In the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union became worried that they were falling behind in high tech. Reagan and George Shultz, his Secretary of State, took advantage of those fears. They showed Soviet leaders high-tech gear opened up to demonstrate that the components came from a host of countries. Russia, as a single and highly repressive country,  they stressed, could not compete with innovations coming from almost the entire world. That argument led Soviet leaders to become less repressive and the result was the end of the Cold War.

Contrast that with Trump's chauvinistic nationalism, which is leading the world into a nasty trade war that's pitting almost every country on the planet against Trump with his crazy tariff 'dictate of the day.'