waveparticle

verne arase said:

Be even better if Apple would divest global production from China - there are simply too many land mines in China, and keeping the supply chain free of forced labor and the like will always be problematic.

At last count there are 248 million people infected with COVID-19, and that's just the first phase.

Add to that the aggressive posture of China's wolf warrior diplomacy and you have a recipe for disaster should China further its aggressive stance in the South China Sea.

freeassociate2 said:

Welp, looks like the racists (”it doesn't effect me so it can’t be racism”) are out in force.

They key here is that even though the limits of oximeters are known, Apple went ahead and introduced the feature regardless of how it would impact users’ experience. No disclaimers. No apparent skin tone detection. No on Watch warning or dialogue allowing you to adjust for skin tone. And do on. It’s marketed, engineered, and now defended as working for the default skin color assumption... i.e light-skinned people. It’s not a leap to assume that has there been more people with darker skin tones involved in the decision making, this would have been flagged as a bug or a non-starter. So yes, this is the sort of structural or chain of casual racism that you can encounter.
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The separate case regarding medical treatment outcomes will likely be the more serious and far-reaching. The medical industry has a history of these types of errors in judgment. We’ll have to wait and see how well the device makers trained people, what disclaimers are in training literature, research papers and the like, as well as how well hospitals and other organizations trained their staffs.

I’ll remind everyone that if the shoe were on the other foot, and light skinned people’s lives had been endangered by a fault in the device or training, this would be a major shitfest in general, in the news cycle for weeks, and likely the target of very public and swift government reaction.

Also, anyone trotting out “frivolous lawsuit” — have a care. That term has been weaponized to question the legitimacy of valid the legal rights of black and brown Americans for decades. Do some research before you use that as a point of argument.

There’s also a bunch of folks that mixing up the two cases. The case for medical treatment is being referred to as supporting evidence that Apple management and engineers should or would have known about the technology’s limitations as currently designed.
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For anyone interested in well researched institutional racism, how casually it’s applied, and what cumulative effect it continues to have on generations of Americans, I highly recommend The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. It’s an excellent example of legal and historical analysis being applied to understand American legal history, and how it’s been used to create and defend racial hierarchies.
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Please think twice before responding to me in anything less than a civil and respectful way. If all you’re going to do is trot out manufactured talking points and threats to society, don’t bother. You’ve had quite enough air-time already. I won’t engage trolls.

For anyone with a good-faith question or argument, I’ll do my best to respond, given my limited time and energy. (And also limited patience. Educate yourselves, people. If it were an engineering issue, you’d go look up info in technical and science resources — not Faux News and its ilk. Do the same here. Read a book, even if you disagree with it. Or ask me for a link or several.)

zimmie said:

MacPro said:

I can't see what Apple could do?  If they improved the sensitivity wouldn't that just make measurements better for light skins too, thus maintaining the differential?  It's physics not bias. 

Not necessarily. All pulse oximeters use a measurement correction curve to convert from the amount of reflected light to an oxygenation percentage. That curve needs to change based on skin tone and possibly other characteristics we don’t even know about today (since only recently did a million people start carrying an oximeter around with them everywhere). Correcting the curve for darker skin would make readings for lighter skin less accurate, so it would need to be adjustable.