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's a good illustration of the difference between ionizing radiation (as with x-rays) and radio waves (as with an iPhone). 

—Ionizing radiation has enough concentrated energy to break tiny things, such as the DNA in a cell. That can jumpstart a cancer. In physics the distinction between particles and waves is murky, but ionizing radiation behaves more like a particle and thus like a bullet fired from a gun. Just keep in mind that like a bullet the harm done done depends on where a particle hits. Most of the time getting an x-ray is not going to give you cancer. It doesn't hit where it damages a cell's DNA. And even then the risk is selective. For I time I cared for children getting early bone-marrow transplants. The dose they received was lethal, but it was lethal because it primarily killed their blood cells, which in their case had cancer. The bone marrow from a matched donor was then transfused in, allowing them to recover. So even massive doses of radiation only kill in certain ways.

—The energy in a radio transmission is more spread out and thus concentrates less energy at any specific point. It can warm food in a microwave oven but in can't break down DNA.  And the warmth you get from a watt or so of energy from an iPhone is quite slight, less than you'd get standing bareheaded in the sun. For cell phones, the waves are a few inches in length. That spreads out their energy, making it for all we know harmless. The limits for cell phones are arbitrary. People regularly work around radio power levels that are far higher without harm. I have worked around military radars ranging from four megawatts (S band) to ten megawatts (C band). That was years ago and I've yet to grow a second head.

A good illustration of that harmless of radio energy are the Chain Home radars the British used during WWII. To give the radars enough range, they used about the most energy that could be generated at the time, some 200,000 watts. The antennas did little to focus that energy other than send it toward the skies over France. That meant those working nearby on the radars received a incredible amount of radio energy. Friends suggested they might not be able to had kids. Someone I read who'd worked at a Chain Home station said that wasn't so, that after the war she and her fellow workers had lots of normal children.

This regulatory hysteria makes me glad I'm not living in France or Belgium. If my iPhone 12 Pro Max radiates a bit more power, then good. I'll get more range.

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/

After years of promising a lawsuit, the US Department of Justice has finally brought an antitrust suit against Apple. 

That hints at what's going on here. With the election coming up in November, Biden's DOJ is showboating. "See," it is saying, "we're trying to do something about those big tech monopolies." Given how long these disputes last, this lawsuit is unlikely to be decided—perhaps in Apple's favor—before the election.

Treat Apple Pay like credit cards? That's an excellent idea. It'd create a level playing field between the two methods of payment and encourage competition and innovation by both.

Putting a research lab in China makes no sense. China has a well-deserved reputation for intellectual property theft. That's bad enough with the items are already in production. It's far worse to have ideas stolen when they're still under development. China could be releasing Apple-designed products before Apple itself does so.

Crazy, crazy, crazy.

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.

Apple has been having no luck arguing against the EU's Digital Markets Act, and it's paid the price in fines and forced changes to its App Store — so now it's looking for a European head of PR.

What Apple says is that the job is about "helping us inform the world about Apple and the values that drive our company."

Apple would be better advised to quit seeing the problem as a matter of public relations and its company "values" and pay more attention to the values that drive Europe's economy.

I find it more than a little bizarre that when is comes to China, a one-party dictatorship, Apple has no problem with setting aside its presumably democratic and rights-centric values, and yet when it comes to a democratic Europe Apple insists that Apple's values must reign supreme. Odd, really odd.

I might add that, while I often disagree EU dictates, seeing them as paternalistic or dysfunctional, those are Europe's choices and the consequences are their own. Those differences are deeply rooted in the differing cultures of Europe and the U.S. The risk takers came here. The more cautious stayed there. Two centuries that still matters.