hckrnws

Apple was in a patent dispute over this feature with Massimo. Their workaround is to calculate blood oxygen on the iPhone, using the sensors from Apple Watch.

The Apple Watch hardware is otherwise the same. The back of the watch shines light of a specific wavelength into your skin and measures the reflected light. Heart rate sensing uses green (525 nm) and infrared (850–940 nm) light; blood oxygen sensing added a red light at 660 nm in 2020.

The iPhone will now calculate the ratio of absorbed red to infrared light, then apply calibration constants from experimental data to estimate blood oxygen saturation.

More detailed writeup on how the technology works is here: https://www.empirical.health/metrics/oxygen/

Software patents are a scourge.

I would be a bit more sympathetic if this was not about a trillion dollar company who poached some employees rather than engage in a licensing deal.

25 employees including the CTO, and then bought a building nearby to Masimo's office for them to work in. At least according to the CEO of Masimo in public statements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR1o8EoW-Eg

Doesn't sound like the bad part to me.

If Masimo wanted to, they'd have offered them the same or more to keep them, but they didn't. I don't believe an employer has any right to expect other companies not to offer positions to their employees. Employees should not be kept in the dark on opportunities for better pay and conditions because you can't or don't want to fight that offer.

Absolutely. But if the new company pays them to just recreate the IP the developed in the previous company - now much faster because they‘ve done it before - that‘s an issue. And patents protect against that.

That said, a patent whose primary claim seems to be (based on the workaround) _where_ the processing takes place (ant not _how_) seems like exactly the kinda thing that shouldn‘t be patentable.

If it means anything, Masimo acts like they invented this technology when it originated in Japan.

Yeah, I haven't had the time to look over their patent, so I just wanted to touch on the poaching.

Sounds good for the employees, so go Apple?

Giving a pass to trillion dollars companies for them to just come next to something they are interested in, poach employees, steal IP and not give a dim to actual innovators sure will be a great incentive towards companies doing more R&D.

Wait, who are the "actual innovators" if not the valuable employees Apple hired?

And I’m sure they did this out of the kindness of their hearts, while not being paid and with equipment they purchased themselves and stored in their garage.

Abuse of the patent system can be deeply problematic. This is not one of them. This is one of the richest company in the world stealing the work paid by another.

The company that employed them to make those innovations.

They didn't poach employees. They made a better offer — in other words competed — in the labor market.

Employees aren't animals in the forest where the king has the sole right to hunt them for sport.

> They made a better offer — in other words competed — in the labor market.

And when this is done for the sole purpose of acquiring a specific kind of talent - especially to build exactly the same thing - it’s called poaching.

The word “poach” is used in numerous ways and describes many things that have nothing to do with hunting for sport [0]. I think it’s a bit problematic to hold on to a singular definition here that clearly does not apply to the situation.

- [0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/poach

Employees are not game. They cannot be “poached.” That phrasing implies that they are property of the company that employs them. What you call “poaching” is just giving an offer to a person, and that person accepting the offer of their own free will. The idea that this is bad is absurd, and only serves to hurt regular people in favor of companies.

>Employees are not game. They cannot be “poached.”

Didn't Apple settle an anti-poaching lawsuit?

Yup, along with other companies. It was a "no cold call" agreement, or I guess antipoaching.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

I’m not saying that the act of hiring people away from another company doesn’t happen. I’m saying that “poaching” is a horrible term for that action, because it implies that employees are property than can be stolen, rather than free persons who can be enticed to change employment.

> because it implies that employees are property than can be stolen

What makes you believe this? The definition of “poach” is not intrinsically linked to the notion of ownership/property.

The word has several definitions, one of which describes a method of preparing eggs (and others that clearly distinguish between things like illegally killing animals, hiring practices, etc).

It doesn’t make sense to me to take the definition that has nothing to do with employment and attach the weight/meaning of that unrelated definition to hiring practices.

Put another way, it would be silly to say “poaching is a horrible term to use for this because it implies that employees are eggs that can be cooked and eaten”. I find the consternation about hiring terminology here to be about the same.

Better hope that Apple pays you really well for your sevices. In six months they won't need you anymore and your former employer will have been sure to burn all the bridges you thought were left.

I mean, get that money, but don't expect that you can make a career out of being poached repeatedly. If you're really that good, you probably could have done better working for yourself.

Honor among thieves is an expression from before there was a group that treated honor as a fiduciary crime. If you are not one of the smaller number of engineers needed once the product is developed your best value in the market is to a series of competitors establishing the same features.

[flagged]

Regardless of whether it’s a bad idea, it’s a free choice of the person accepting or rejecting the offer. Describing it as “poaching” denies their agency and portrays employees as property of their employer.

That’s not what poaching means. Poaching describes the comportement of one company towards another. Employees are entirely accessory to what is being described here.

What’s meaningful is that Apple was hiring them because of the work they did for Massimo and doing so en masse at a single point of time.

If they had just hired experts on blood monitoring to staff a team and some of them happened to be working for Massimo before, it would just be hiring as usual and not described as poaching.

What’s wrong with that? Those employees took the offer of their own volition. There’s nothing wrong with offering someone a job because of their relevant experience.

“Employees are entirely accessory” is exactly the shit I’m arguing against here. The whole idea of “poaching” implies that the employees are property, to be guarded by their owners and stolen by others. How can the people who actually do the work and are the entire reason for this so-called “poaching” not be central to it?

You are arguing in the void I’m afraid.

Once again, poaching describes the comportment of a company towards another. It’s not a statement regarding the morality of accepting of rejecting the offer from the point of view of the employee. It doesn’t in any way implies that employees are the property of a company.

The issue is not about whether or not employees are central to work. That much is obvious. The issue is that building a talented team and putting in place the condition for it to properly work is a significant cost. That’s why it’s generally illegal for another company to just come and rehire everyone wholesale.

The issue is not even hiring talents from another company. The issue is that it’s targeted. They are not hired because they are extremely talented. They are hired because they work for Massimo and will bring trade secrets with them.

I’m sure the Apple of this world would like it being completely legal a lot. It would basically put a damper on any small companies trying to compete with them if they could just come and buy out the team of any potential threat to their hegemony.

“That’s why it’s generally illegal for another company to just come and rehire everyone wholesale.”

Er, what? Can you elaborate on what makes this illegal?

If employees have agency, why do they have so little collective control over employment trends?

Because “agency” means making choices and taking actions, not controlling things a million times bigger than yourself.

There is no such thing as “poaching” employees - just paying them a market rate.

If you actively go out of your way to hire people from company X on a priority bases rather than skills (and no, trade secrets are not "skills"), then you're poaching and it is not same as paying market rate.

I think it’s a bit disingenuous to frame this as a situation no different than “paying market rate”.

Whether you like this or not, the practice of hiring employees specifically to work on the same thing elsewhere or to drain a company of its talent - is called poaching.

It’s often legal, but can be controversial especially when it’s a behemoth raiding smaller shops.

You seem to be offended by the word itself, but it’s just a useful descriptor to differentiate between different types of hiring scenarios.

I’ve been poached before, and it worked out great for me.

> steal IP

if your IP is just lines on a patent you dont really have much moat in the first place.

If Apple wants to copy your IP, and you're in consumer electronics, you don't have a moat. You're done.

That's a problem, even if it only has the perception of being true.

Tomorrow's innovations in consumer electronics won't get funding as investors balk at the risk of getting Massimo'd.

It's not unheard of for developers to refuse to turn good ideas into startups for exactly this reason.

The innovators are the employers. The company doesn’t innovate. So if the employees got taken care of then the actual innovators made out well.

Innovators require the ecosystem.

Yes, very good for the employees. Apple even offered them 2x their salaries to leave Masimo.

(I couldn't reply down another level.)

>How HN can support monopolization of markets and killing of [sic] competition is beyond me.

That suggests HN is a monoculture of some sort of united front. It is not. Diversity of opinion is best for this community (and all communities).

And, sorry, what competition was killed off here? I, as the consumer, was never considering Massimo for my blood oxygen measurement needs. I bought an Apple Watch and just want it to be as feature-full as possible. So does Apple.

Why were you never considering them for your blood oxygen measurement needs?

Not the OP but as someone in the same boat.

I wasn’t going to buy a device just for blood monitoring. What they produced is valuable to me as a feature of a product but not as a product in of itself

I bought a cheap pulse oximeter during the pandemic and what I learned is that when I’m feeling light-headed, blood oxygen is low. So I decided that my body’s built-in blood oximeter is probably good enough most of the time.

It’s sort of like having your watch tell you whether you slept well or not. Didn’t you already know? If you think you slept well and your watch disagrees, are you going to trust its opinion over your own?

Even people with sleep apnea don't know they are waking up multiple times an hour all night. You really have no clue how you're sleeping until you put it to the test.

Also, I don't think most people are in a position where they feel like they have amazing sleep every night. Yeah, maybe those people have nothing to gain from gadgets kind of like a person at ideal weight doesn't gain anything from counting calories: but what about the rest of us?

My wrist device was critical in helping me realize how few hours I was sleeping despite being in bed with my eyes closed for 8 hours.

And what did you do with that information?

There are lots of ways it can help. Finding out you wake up an abnormal amount of times could be a sign of sleep apnea or something else. One could take that information and get a sleep study.

These apps can detect that you are moving around a lot and also detect that you are snoring (another sign of sleep apnea).

Even if you know that you snore without using a sleeping app, that doesn't really give you a picture of how bad it could be. I apparently stop breathing and sometimes start choking in my sleep.

Now that I have a diagnosis of sleep apnea sleep apps are still really helpful. If I'm still snoring, it means I probably need to adjust the pressure on my CPAP machine. If the app for my CPAP machine tells me that I'm having a lot of episodes over the course of the night, I might need to adjust the pressure or the fit of the mask.

sleep apps have probably literally saved lives.

Yea, so if Apple didn’t copy the other company’s work, they’d have been forced to buy devices from or license the other company’s work. So instead of your money for the blood oxygen sensor going to that company, it went to Apple.

So we should allow apple to have monopoly power in every industry because otherwise it'd be annoying to buy separate devices.

… who made that claim?

Where did anyone claim that Apple ought to have a monopoly on blood oxygen measurement in a wearable electronic device, let alone "have monopoly power in every industry"?

>monopoly on blood oxygen measurement in a wearable electronic device

And I know this isn't your argument, but that's a VERY narrow market for the purposes of a US inquiry into monopolies. Like, the normal market definition fights are about whether you should be considering "premium smartphones" or "smartphones" as a whole. Or all of the grocery stores in a given region, and whether that should include convenience stores that also sell groceries.

I'd be hard pressed to imagine a court really contemplating an argument that a company has a monopoly in a very small slice of a market. It would be like saying that Rolex has a monopoly in luxury sport watches with headquarters in Geneva.

The definition of a monopoly is that it can engage in monopolistic practices. Poaching IP to destroy a small company is very much a monopolistic practice, and has a chilling effect on the rest of the market.

Of course in Apple's case this Masimo story is not the only monopolistic practice.

The correct analogy would be a watch market dominated by Casio and Swatch with no independent smaller brands.

Because every smaller brand that becomes somewhat successful is bought out by the Big Two. Or never gets that far because new IP somehow ends up being the sole property of the Big Two through various other means.

(Technically an oligopoly, but still maintained by monopolistic lock-ins and actions.)

Because why would I want to destroy the planet by purchasing an additional new watch for each single feature that I wanted to leverage? This seems hugely damaging to the environment just to enrich the lives of < 100 people.

Masimo never paid well. $100k to $120k for a senior software engineer. 2x sounds good but probably brought them up to average bay area salaries.

Yikes. That's like the poverty line in Silicon Valley.

why is 2x the right number for their current employees? how are the employees that left the company, but contributed to the patent/company being compensated with this deal?

Yes "very good", until Apple decides to mass-layoff them, because now, owning the valuable core IP and having killed their primary competitor in the field, Apple can do whatever they want and get away with it because those employees have nowhere else to go in the area. 200+ IQ move </slow_clap>.

How people on HN can support monopolization of markets and killing of competition is beyond me, since in the end it always bites them in the ass (see recent mass layoffs in the industry), yet this lesson seems to be quickly forgotten.

Lamego only stayed at Apple six months. He was very productive. He filed 12 new patents for Apple. But he apparently had disputes with managers. The details aren't entirely clear. But Lamego ended up resigning. After leaving Apple, he founded his own company, True Wearables, which was also successfully sued by Masimo for trade secret theft.

> owning the valuable core IP and having killed their primary competitor in the field, Apple can do whatever they want

Massimo still owns the core IP. Apple owns some other IP.

> How people on HN can support monopolization of markets

There was one niche (note: still massive) provider of this technology. Now there are two, one of which is mass. Even if that collapses to one mass, that’s objectively better. More competitors and more consumer surplus is not a monopoly condition.

There is a difference between being reflexively anti-Apple regardless of the circumstances and being pro-monopoly.

Masimo does so much more than consumer-worn heart rate monitors and O2 sensors. They'll be fine as well.

They will be fine, but maybe they want to be FANG rich. You do not get there if the already big companies play by different rules and can out spend the minute you pose a threat.

They're already in most of the hospitals in America. There was one attached to my daughter's foot for 100+ days. I don't think they care about FAANG at all. They're not a software company. Look them up - this is big companies fighting, not David and Goliath.

>Look them up - this is big companies fighting, not David and Goliath.

Massimo is 400x smaller than Apple. WTF are you talking about like they're in the same weight class?

Maybe if Masimo had made Lamego a significant shareholder, he wouldn't have left his "CTO" role to become a mere Apple employee. Masimo is an $8b company. They created a spinoff called Cercacor which Lamego got to be CTO of. My best guess is it wasn't a real startup like we're used to in the Silicon Valley sense. There wasn't any real opportunity for him to gain generational wealth there if he was successful. Apple not only hired him, but thirty other of their employees too, because Apple recognized that their talent was worth more than a licensing deal. That's the issue with these non-valley enterprises. They're very feudal in the sense that the owners treat their engineers and scientists like ordinary workers, expect total loyalty, and pull out their legal guns when they don't get their way. Big tech companies like Apple are more meritocratic and generally offer smart people much better deals. A court later found Lamego hadn't made his moves entirely fairly, but I believe if you look at the big picture, Apple's behavior wasn't predatory, but rather liberatory.

> Big tech companies like Apple are more meritocratic and generally offer smart people much better deals.

It’s mindblowing how big of a gap this is for these non-tech companies. I work for a company that sold to PE. The owners walked away with the vast majority of a 1.5 billion deal.

I asked if employees were given anything. “Sure. Some got as much as 50k!” I was told.

Using some standard equity math for early engineers, I back of napkined that the 25 year tenure engineers, if they were at big tech, should have gotten low 7 figures. Nope. They got 50k out of 1.5 billion.

(No, PE had no say on how that 1.5 billion was divided up for those of you quick to blame PE.)

Yeah tech startups are great like that. Big tech companies are even better. With them, you don't have to wait for a successful exit, or even work there that long, to get your low seven figures. No one in America is working harder to restore the middle class than the tech industry. Even the person who cleans my house makes more than 50k. Meanwhile legacy enterprises and private equity are doing everything in their power to destroy it. This is a moral righteous struggle for the heart of America, which makes it such a shame that Lamego was found by the courts to have acted dishonorably, but we mustn't forget who's side we're on.

> maybe they want to be FANG rich

Their (limited) levels.fyi data does not indicate this is one of their goals.

Is there evidence of Apple doing this in the past?

Apple is infamous for driving other companies into bankruptcy to acquire their assets. For a single example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_Technology

How is that an example of Apple driving a company into bankruptcy to acquire their assets? Judging from the Wikipedia article, it looks like Exponential Technologies made a good PowerPC CPU, but Motorola promised they'd be able to catch up, and it's safer to bet on a big company that you've been doing business with than to rely on a startup for a critical component.

Licensed Mac clones were only available for two years (1995-1997), and discontinuing the program drove many other companies out of business, so it's hard to see how the change was a ploy to acquire a single company's assets. It seems more likely that Jobs discontinued licensing because it caused Apple to lose money.

And it looks like much of the Exponential Technologies team continued under a different name, then was bought by Apple in 2010 for $121 million.[1]

If there are other examples, can you provide one that is more recent and/or more blatant?

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/technology/28apple.html

When they started, they were producing for multiple small customers. Apple was frustrated with Motorola and approached them but demanded they massively increase their production capacity (Apple's model for dominating a supplier... put them in debt and beholden to them for orders) and effectively dominated them as a customer...

Then used them to negotiate a better price with Motorola, dumped their purchase contract for 'reasons' and bankrupted the company.

Exponential sued.. and won $500 million... for breach contract but were destroyed by that point. Apple gobbled up their IP for around $20 mil later on.

I can't find any articles about Exponential winning the lawsuit, only that they filed one and sought $500 million in damages. Had they won, I think it would have been in the press. The only thing I could find was Apple's 10K from 1999[1], which says they settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed amount:

> This matter was settled during the fourth quarter of 1999 for an amount not material to the Company's financial position or results of operations.

If Apple did pay $500 million, I think that would have been material to the company's financial position, as their profit that year was $601M.

Again, are there any examples that are less debatable and/or more recent? I don't have a dog in this fight. But if Apple is infamous for this behavior, it seems like there would be stronger examples.

1. See page 59: https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive...

I have not found the records online (a lawyer can probably find it) but I was involved with some of the people in 1997/1998. There were multiple lawsuits going for years as Apple held 5% ownership.

The original team ended up founding Intrinsity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity) and being involed with the Samsung A8 and Apple A4 designs. Apple ended up buying the company and many of those people are the ones designing their current chips. (https://touchreviews.net/apple-intrinsity-implications/)

Oh... and I forgot this case also exposed that Apple had embedded proprietary IP into the CPU design which made it impossible to seel the already produced CPUs to anyone else (PowerPC chips were in very high demand at the time and these were the fastest on the market).

That’s not evidence of Apple doing mass layoffs, though.

>Apple can do whatever they want and get away with it because those employees have nowhere else to go in the area. 200+ IQ move.

I would bet Apple, and the other large publicly listed tech companies, have lifted far more employees into financial independence from employers than any other business in history.

>I would bet Apple, and the other large publicly listed tech companies, have lifted far more employees into financial independence from employers than any other business in history.

So doing monopolistic and illegal things is OK because it makes some people rich?

> have lifted far more employees into financial independence

They've also destroyed financial independence. They've engaged in anti-competitive and anti-poaching practices before. There's several famous examples.

Anyways, are you saying it's Apple's goal to lift employees in this way, or does it just happen to be incidental to whatever their CEO wants at the moment?

Also all the people actually _making_ those devices, surely the largest labor pool supporting their business, have zero financial independence. That's the typical western blind spot.

> from employers than any other business in history

I think that'd be the US Government and it's GI Bill. Okay, technically not a business, but if the virtue is independence, then it shouldn't matter who provided it.

Let's not forget Masimo picked the fight. Apple was fine letting them compete.

Pardon? Masimo was first and Apple took their tech (as confirmed by a court). Was Masimo supposed to sit there and shrug?

If they couldn't get a patent on the LED setup, just the software, then yes. They should just shrug and compete. The idea of a piece of software should always be open to competition.

First to what? Sensor was invented in 1972.

Hah, plenty of people have described Masimo, 400 times smaller than Apple, in the threads on this as "bullying Apple unfairly by being a patent troll."

Had Apple offered a good licensing deal to the company, it would have been good for the company too. Especially if said employees had stocks as part of their compensation package.

But it was cheaper to Apple to just hire a few key people and screwing over everyone else.

Good or bad depends on how Massimo compare to Apple. Which one of the two offers the most growth potential. If Apple just keep the employees long enough to steal the tech before laying the off, not building on it, then it is terrible for all but Apple shareholders. If Apple "saved" these employees from an exploitative company, providing the with growth potential and further development then it is a good thing.

I think the good is offset by Apple using its other hand to suppress wages for other employees by engaging in “no poaching” practices with other companies.

Probably a net-negative.

lol from the company that colluded with multiple other companies to keep developer salaries down.

Good for everyone except whoever had money invested in Masimo

Similar to what HNers are so happy to say about restaurant owners who actually have to be profitable and can’t depend on the largess of investors, if Masimo can’t afford to pay market rates to developers, the company doesn’t deserve to exist.

Right. Somehow people here are struggling on how to pin blame on Apple even when developers are better off with Apple's offer. It is a great outcome for anyone who is developer.

If in their world view "best developer salary is not always the best thing" one could have better reasoning for supporting little guy Massimo getting crushed by Apple.

On what level however?

One of the biggest pain points I have had with the 'smartphone revolution' post Android/iOS is that almost every wearable/pocketable is a watch. nobody's trying new formats that could be useful!

huh?

There are smart rings and smart glasses on the market. Some fitness trackers have a necklace mode or can be put on shoe laces.

Watches are most popular likely because they are probably the most widespread accessory people already use.

So if Apple came to your company, promising licensing, collaboration and other things, when all along their intention was to "take" "your" employees, you'd be cool with that deception?

The employees made out better - good for them. That's a lot easier to do when you have a market cap 400 times higher than that of the company you made all these promises to, and then left holding the bag.

If another company taking some of your employees will affect you company's bottom line, then you better pay those employees handsomely.

And by “pay” liquid cash or liquid equity in a publicly traded stock - not illiquid “equity” in a private company.

Sincere question for you: Do you actually believe that your employees belong to you?

No. That's why I framed those words. They're not taken, and they're not yours.

I thought I was pretty clear that I felt the outcome for the employees was positive and that Apple's actions were actively deceptive. It was clear in the trial that Apple had zero intention of collaboration, licensing, or patent sharing and just used that as a pretense to "get in the room" and see who showed up on Masimo's side so they knew who to target with competing offers.

Got it, sorry, I misinterpreted what you were saying.

If apple hired them to work on something else, but they hired them to steal tech from their old company.

There were no trade secrets involved. It was a patent. Here it is

https://patents.google.com/patent/US10912502B2/

They were hired for their expertise. Do you want to start enforcing non competes in California?

This, but unironically

Great for the employees. But Apple submarined their way in offering partnership, licensing, collaboration, with near zero plans to do any of it.

So good for the employees, but I wouldn't be applauding Apple for their outright deceptions here.

They destroyed the founders company and stole their IP in the process though. Let’s not forget there’s actual victims in this story.

What did they steal? CEO destroyed his own company when he bought a bunch of highend speaker brands. WTF is a medical device company doing buying consumer audio companies?

That’s not for you to decide. It somebody is eating/smoking/drinking themselves to death, does that give you the right to murder them?

I don't follow your argument. Are you saying eating or smoking to death is like a CEO making bad decisions that causes their company to struggle?

No, it’s that murdering someone doing those things is wrong. Even if the company is clearly circling the drain that doesn’t give apple or anyone else the right to steal their staff and infringe on their ip.

There’s no such thing as stealing staff especially when you severely underpay you employees. $100k for sr devs. Pay them what they’re worth and they won’t leave.

It's time for Cook to cook out really

Why would they license something that was invented 50+ years ago? No one else pays a license for it. Not even valid patent as the company couldn't prove it court it was a valid patent and the case ended up being hung jury with all but one jury that held out. Only reason they couldn't import it because

Travesty is the ITC is allowed to block imports without going to court. Banning imports shouldn't be done by some government institution and should be handled by the court system.

It's really easy to avoid your employees being "poached": treat them well, and pay them better.

Wow you must work for a company with incredibly deep pockets. No way can massimo compete on salary with apple. Only people in the game who can do that are google facebook apple chatgpt etc.

As long as a company is turning a profit, they by definition can afford to be paying their employees better. As a company you can choose not to, but it also means you get to suffer the consequences, and lose the right to complain that your employees were "poached" when in reality it was simply a matter of you not paying them enough to stay.

Yea, these employees are not being "poached." They're not zero-agency deer owned by Masimo, grazing on their land, that Apple came in and stole away. They can decide for themselves that someone else is offering a better business arrangement.

There is a market rate for talent, and if you can't afford the market rate, then you don't get the talent.

If you compete with someone who can afford to lose money longer than you, for example because they have some departments with very high margins and can cross-subsidize, you can win.

Profit distribution only makes sense to owners of the company.

A better way to give employees a share of the profits is to give them shares of the company. But then that also comes at the expense of compensation in dollars. You cannot pay for groceries with company shares.

People really like the idea of "When you win, I get money, when you lose, you lose money". Explained like that they agree it's bad, but explained like "Companies should be distributing profits to workers" they fall over themselves about how good of an idea it is.

Running a business is a gamble and like gambling, you need to put skin in the game to get a share of winnings (and lose your skin in the losses). People are just hyper-focused on the winners.

> People really like the idea of "When you win, I get money, when you lose, you lose money". Explained like that they agree it's bad,

It's not bad, it's a cost.

You obviously wouldn't make a deal like that in isolation. You also wouldn't give someone a salary for nothing. But a cost like that can be worth paying just like a salary is worth paying. (Obviously you'd have limits on the numbers, just like salary is limited.)

The salary is the cost.

People think that profits should be distributed on top of salary. And frankly it already happens to a degree with bonuses. But there is this pervasive idea that any leftover profit is just money that should have gone to workers.

Most jobs have benefits on top of salary.

Distributing part of the profits would be a reasonable benefit.

There are hundreds of millions of profits here. Distributing even 10% of that to employees would be a tremendous amount of money. Even a lot less would have a big effect.

A 10% profit share makes plenty of sense. Yes, even while insulating employees from losses, it still makes sense. Owners need to be able to reap profit but they don't need to get all of it forever. Employees owning stock is not the only way profit sharing can work.

This has nothing to do with their point.

If company X is making a profit and losing employees to a competitor paying more, then company X has effectively chosen to let that happen. They don’t get to complain that they ate their cake and don’t have it anymore.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

There's no way Massimo could have competed in a salary race with Apple. Apple could have paid those employees MILLIONS if they wanted to.

Yes, this is capitalism. Apple get 1st rate engineers, Massimo gets 3rd. If they want 2nd, they pay more

I mean, this doesn't tell us whether they can pay them twice as much or $5 more per year. Some companies make no profit, or very little, or very little per employee.

Masimo was worth ~$16B when this was going down. They are worth $8B today. This is roughly the size of American Airlines. Masimo is not the biggest company, but they are a large publicly-traded company.

The company does $2B in revenue and spends close to $800 million annually in sales, general and admin. This is over 3x their R&D budget. (For reference, Apple's R&D spend is higher than its SG&A spend.)

Per levels.fyi, Masimo is paying senior SDEs in HCOL $150k. They could 10x the comp to these critical employees without it being more than a rounding error in their numbers. (I don't think they would have had to go to 10x. Most people would practically tattoo a brand on themselves for a one-time bonus of $1m.)

Long story short: Masimo does indeed have the money to compete on salary with Apple for this set of employees. They chose to spend the money on attorneys instead.

Some companies don't value engineers. That often works, until they end up in an engineering competition against companies that do value engineers.

I disagree with your assertion that Masimo has the money to compete. Apple's upside to employing these folks to build the tech into the Apple Watch is FAR, FAR greater than Masimo's potential sales growth for existing pulse ox devices (or patent licenses). With Apple Watches being licensed as medical devices for ECG & pulse ox, this gives clinicians even more reason to leverage them with patients for convenient 24/7 home monitoring. It's not the same market Masimo is serving, at all.

I specifically did not address any of the corporate competitive dynamics, although it is worth noting that this is more of an existential issue for Masimo than Apple.

My core point is is that Masimo has far more than enough money to pay strategic employees enough money to keep them. Again, I doubt they would have to go as high as $5m/year for each of the relevant engineers. Masimo could spend that without making a major dent in their finances.

Could Apple up the ante and make offers of $5B/yr to each engineer? Sure, but we are likely talking about the difference between Masimo offering $150k and Apple offering $500k. These are numbers any public company can afford.

Masimo sells a health monitoring watch. [1] There is direct competition here.

[1]. https://www.masimo.com/products/monitors/masimo-w1-medical-w...

This product WAS generally marketed to the healthcare field, not to people directly.

It was literally described in the page you referenced: "Arm your patients with continuous measurements in a comfortable, lifestyle-friendly wearable—helping you deliver a true telemonitoring experience."

> automates the collection of clinically accurate measurements to help support: -Post-surgical recovery -Chronic care -Patient management

I say "was" because it was possible to buy it as a consumer, but there's still no direct competition, as:

"Please note that all Masimo consumer products have been discontinued. These include:

MightySat® Masimo W1® Sport Watch Opioid Halo™ / Masimo SafetyNet Alert™ Radius T°® Continuous Thermometer Masimo Stork® Vitals, Masimo Stork Vitals+, and Masimo Stork Baby Monitor"

Im not saying they pay them well or not. Theres just not a comparison on comp they could do. That you don't understand the power dynamics between that is something you will hopefully learn about the world as you become more experienced. Apple would just offer more at the end of the day.

I understand, and this is timely in the context of Meta making $100m offers. I have no data on this, but I would be highly surprised if Apple offered anybody more than $5m/year. Masimo has that much money.

Could Apple go higher? Sure, but again most people who like their jobs are not going to leave once their needs are met.

From a competitive standpoint: Masimo has lost $8B in market cap during this kerfuffle. It's entirely possible it would have been rational for Masimo to pay these employees higher than Apple possibly would go in order to not lose those billions in value.

Not my problem. The owners of a small company have no right to force their financial constraints onto their employees.

And as a hypothetical sought after employee, how is that my problem? If another company wants to roll a shit ton of money up to my doorstep, why shouldn’t I take it?

Should I be treating my employer “like family” and care about “the mission”?

It's about the company anti-competitive behaviour. No one said anything about the employees.

This is the exact opposite of being anti-competitive.

The company is being “anticompetitive” by offering someone more money? Should we now make that illegal too?

Acquisitions can be considered anticompetitive. The only thing that appears to differentiate this situation from an acquisition is that the investors didn’t get paid.

How about the fact that both companies are still healthy?

And even if you do look at this like an acquisition, acquisitions are almost always not anticompetitive.

Are you suggesting that the FRC should step in when a company offers employment to a large number of employees at another company? How exactly would you propose to put this into law where it doesn’t hurt the employees?

Well, we've made other situations where companies offer people money illegal. Such as bribery, or paying someone to steal trade secrets.

And neither is alleged. It was a patent that we are discussing which by definition isn’t a trade secret.

But you are coming awfully close to advocating for non competes which is explicitly not allowed in CA.

This is almost farcical. This is literally the opposite of anti-competitive. Please take a basic economics course and pass it before spouting off about economics online.

As an employee you shouldn't care, but if you're someone who wants technological progress to continue, you should care whether companies with a slush fund of billions are able to bully those with less money.

Massimo did not appear to respond to Apple by trying to compete on compensation with them. The levels.fyi data is showing that they appear to pay their engineers between 140-180 while they are making hundreds of millions in profit.

It seems like Masimo wasn’t bullied because they had less money. They decided to run to the government to protect them instead of doing actual competition

You mean like the innovation that someone else here said that was denied a patent in Japan because of prior art?

We like software patents now?

I skimmed this and it doesn't look like a software patent to me. It's a giant long description of the hardware.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US10912502B2/

that doesn't work when Apple can pay them multiples "more well".

the sensible thing would be to license the tech

- is what Tim Cook told himself to vanquish the last bit of uneasiness. Then he took of his glasses, set them on the night stand, and slept better than he had in years.

Absolutely. Similarly, I tell parents who keep whining about soaring education costs and employability: Educate them well, and get them high paying jobs.

right, just learn to outrun the chubby guys when the bear chases.

I generally agree, but the company likely doesn't have those funds. Considering the largest player (Apple) stands to make way more from it than you and just works around your patent.

Not arguing Apple shouldn't poach, just that your suggestion doesn't work.

The company made a billion dollars in profit last year. I doubt Apple was willing to pay anywhere near that amount to hire an employee.

They did not earn $1B in profit in the last year. Or 5.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/masimo/earnings/

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MASI/masimo/net-in...

Check the ratio of SG&A to R&D spend at MASI. They have money, they just choose not to spend it on engineering.

yes, and ribcage should be mesh-gridded if it did not want to be knifed, Right?

[dead]

Or just collude with your rival companies ala Steve Jobs.

They were "poached" or the employees negotiated their value?

"anti-poaching" is how big tech companies described their anti-competitive agreements [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

I don't how can you patent "read sensor, and process readings on device" I get if how it's actual sensor was patented, not "read and compute"

Have you read the patent?

Yes. Apple is working around that patent by moving computing to a different place. I don't think it's something that should be patentable.

My reading of the claims is that the novelty is having the processor integrated in the sensor protrusion. So processing the data elsewhere (particularly on a different device) would avoid infringement.

And then let their product lose the feature for multiple years rather than settling for some amount of money that was absolutely trivial to them.

It sets an example for the others.

Poaching employees is a good thing and should always be allowed. Companies have the means to prevent this at any time. It's called contract employment. But if they insist on being able to fire me at any time, they can eat the downside of that too.

Wow. So you view corporate employees like serfs bound to the land, not allowed to seek better opportunities for themselves? That’s kind of… dark.

> I would be a bit more sympathetic if this was not about a trillion dollar company who poached some employees rather than engage in a licensing deal.

Obviously the people who suffer are customers. There isn't a single instance where IP helps them.

I hate the word “poaching”. A company offered employees more money in exchange for their labor.

I see no issue. Would you have preferred what happened in the Jobs era where 7 of the largest tech firms colluded not to hire from each other’s company?

Two things can be bad at once.

Apple has a massive war chest they can leverage to crush competition in several ways. As a nation and as consumers, we should at least be wary of what they're doing and whether it stifles competition or innovation. Even if the actions are legal.

There's a difference between Apple paying more for engineers in general vs Apple specifically targeting a competitor, acquiring all the talent from that competitor, then using the IP that talent brought to roll out substantially the same product.

There was no IP to poach. The IP was in a publicly available patent.

Every company that proactively reaches out to an employed individual is doing so because that employee has demonstrated elsewhere and probably at their current job skills and experience that they find valuable and I assume is willing to make a better offer for them.

Other posters said that Masimo was paying developers $140K - $180k. That’s a nothingburger for good developers. The BigTech company I was working for two years ago was offering returning interns about that much in cash + liquid RSUs

I once worked for a startup where everyone loved the CTO, the startup got acquired after I left by a PE company.

When he left to be the CTO of another company in the same vertical, 10 of the employees followed him within the next six months basically taking all of the developers and sales that he wanted and all of the worthwhile staff from the startup. I assume it was for more money.

If I had still been at the startup when he left, he would have easily “poached” me too?

Should that also have been illegal? Was that unethical?

Apple is able to do what they do now because of the shit they got away with in the Jobs era.

Because they hobbled competitors and innovation then they're able to do it now.

It's really hard to determine how detrimental their actions have been to the job market for software engineers.

It is entirely possible that every software engineer is worse off because Apple severely distorted the market and prevented many competitors from growing to be competitors to Apple and what ever offer Apple made to these people pales to what they could be making if Jobs hadn't done what he did.

You mean they hobbled poor little competitors like Google, Adobe, and the other tech companies that agreed to it? Apple was actually one of the smaller companies at the time.

How is all Apple’s fault? And are you really saying that the iPhone wouldn’t have happened if Apple hadn’t gotten into these agreements?

In your alternate universe would Nokia or Rim (who wasn’t involved in the agreement) still been relevant?

No, they hobbled the competitors that their staff could have formed if they had made more money to do so.

That collusion between these big companies to deny their employees a wage driven by free markets allowed those companies to accrue wealth and prevent competition from forming.

That's terrible for their employees, that's terrible for the consumer.

How did their collusion stop a new company from offering more money than the depressed wages that the collusion was causing?

Alternatively, if hypothetically without the collusion do you think the upper wage pressure would I have materially affected those companies bottom lines to not create the products that made them profitable?

The hypothetical new companies that I'm talking about would have been formed by their former employees who could afford to do so with the increased money that they would have made if it hadn't been for the criminal collusion to deny them that capital and us as a society a freer market.

And you're right, there's a distinct possibility the savings that they made in breaking the law could have affected their bottom line at the time in a way that prevented them from making certain products, but it could have also fostered creativity and innovation in the companies that colluded, and increased competition between them and the new companies that would have formed in a way that would have benefited innovation.

What's important is that companies don't break the law and that people are paid as much as they're worth so that they can in turn stimulate the economy in ways that they see fit.

So let me get this straight, if there wages would have been 30% more hypothetically they could have invested their own money (which few startup founders do) built phones or search engines that competed with Apple and Google? Something well funded companies like Microsoft and Facebook couldn’t do?

But now are you also saying that Apple did the right thing when they paid Masimo’s employees more so now they can stimulate the economy and in the future start companies?

A charitable interpretation of what I have wrote is that if Apple had followed the law then they would have more competition and the market would be a healthier place that benefits software developers and consumers alike.

Apple broke the law because they felt that it was in their best interest to the detriment of others and they will likely continue to do so if they feel it is in their best interest.

Why focus just on Apple instead of the other companies - Adobe, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay?

But since when have people making BigTech money been afraid to venture out on their own to found a startup and would 30% more (completely made up number) and that was probably tied up in RSUs and not cash really made a difference?

Shouldn’t the idea that these people were making less than market wages spur them to go to other companies besides those seven or venture off on their own?

Because this is a thread about apple and the other companies are implied with the word 'collusion.'

As to your other points these things are not a binary, they are a gradient with Apple and the companies they colluding with having an incremental effect on the market that accrues over time as they consolidate wealth and restrict competition and the innovation that comes from it.

It is difficult for people to find jobs at other companies that don't exist or that are floundering because apple and others have illegally restricted the flow of capital that would spur their creation.

It seems from your line of questioning that you don't consider the criminal collusion that Apple and others participated in to be detrimental to the software industry and consumers as a whole.

Is that a fair assessment of your opinion? Can you expand on your opinion regarding this matter?

It was detrimental to the employees. And that’s why I’m arguing against the narrative of other commenters that Apple was wrong for offering Masimo employees money to leave.

It’s the same as the Windsurf situation with Google. In other words, I don’t care that Masimo was hurt because employees took a better deal from Apple.

As far as did it hurt the industry, there is really no logical argument that these companies who were already extremely profitable roundly have had the money to invest in their products if they hadn’t suppressed wages, that some new challenger was going to come along and compete with any of them if Microsoft (search and mobile phones) and Facebook (mobile phones couldn’t).

These employees weren’t going to take the extra money they made an invest in some world changing startup (that’s what VCs are for) that would pay more than BigTech. 50-70K wouldn’t be the determining factor to invest in their own startup.

The startup offers I was getting to be a “CTO” [1] (yes it would have been a laughably inflated title) was less than I was making as a mid level employee at AWS at the time (2020-2023) for more work and more risks.

[1] I didn’t go in AWS as a software developer, I went in working in Professional Services. But my previous experience was strategy and architecture at a couple of startups.

Every workaround I've seen for the past 30 years feel like a "Shabbat elevator" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat_elevator) I'm not using the elevator because I'm not pushing the button because it's always moving.

Edit: I've always hated patents too, don't get me wrong.

I dont think the patent in question is for software: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10912502B2/en

IMHO, the problem is that if you are wealthy enough then you don't need to worry about patents. I also think these patents are, on the whole, not great. But here the one company legally got the patent and the another, richer company hired away their talent and paid them to find a workaround to avoid licensing. Smaller companies will continue to license the patent.

Few tears will be shed for Massimo (or Qualcomm) but the next victim could be a much smaller company, maybe one that would be more of a competitor. I don't like the current patent regime but I do believe enforcement should apply to everyone, not just players who lack the money to rig the game.

It's a patent on a physical process for measuring blood oxygen. It's not a software patent.

The whole concept of software patents is a hack; as I understand it algorithms as a rule cannot be patented, so the system running the algorithm is patented instead. This seems to illustrate the absurdity of that workaround.

Isn't this hardware though? :-)

Crazy that this is a 'patent'. We did this experiment in high school 30 years ago.

almost as crazy as a patent for a rectangle with rounded corners

Design patents are a form of trademark with a silly name, not real patents.

Design patents expire, unlike trademarks.

You can also patent the shape of a bottle. https://patents.google.com/patent/USD48160S/en (yes, its an old one).

These fall into the classification of design patent which covers ornamental non-functional elements of a particular item. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent

Design patents also cover typefaces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti... -- note that typefaces cannot be copyrighted in the United States

Design patents differ from a utility patent which covers how something works.

You mean a Squircle®

Apple calls them roundrects: https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html

Technically, a quintic superellipse, in modern times.

That's of course not what the patent was about.

I've just been amazed how many things could be a patent and why I haven't spent time to learn.

[dead]

Phenomenal that the patent is only violated by doing it with the watch cpu but not by funneling the data to a separate cpu. The surest sign that it's a bullshit patent.

They're all like that. Patents are pretty specific.

If they're not very specific there's frequently prior art.

Someone else linked the patent in question and it seems to be about a wearable device. The iphone is carried on your person and not worn as part of the same device, as I understand it.

I still don't think it's a valid patent.

[dead]

I wonder if they could take it one step further. Do the measurements on the watch, do the calculation on the iPhone, send the results back to the watch for display. Technically all the work is done on the iPhone and the watch is just the IO device.

According to the link, the patents in question expire in 2028.

> The iPhone will now calculate the ratio of absorbed red to infrared light, then apply calibration constants from experimental data to estimate blood oxygen saturation.

Sorry, maybe I missed it - but source for this?

It's in the Apple PR https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/08/an-update-on-blood-ox...

> sensor data from the Blood Oxygen app on Apple Watch will be measured and calculated on the paired iPhone

The literal article that is the sole focus of this entire thread?

In my experience, the Apple Watch blood oxygen monitoring was horribly inaccurate. It would report wildly variable results, often telling me that I had a blood oxygen level of 80% (which, if true, would indicate that I should be getting myself to an emergency room ASAP).

Regular pulse oxygen meters are cheap and reliable.

On their best days, they're accurate to within 2-4%. But so many things can trip up the reading, like melanin:

  As a result, for darker-skinned patients, oxygen saturation readings can read as normal when they are, in fact, dangerously low.

When everyone starting looking at every percentage point of their SpO2 during COVID as if it were life or death, the FDA had to remind people of this:

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/fda-brief/fda-brief-fda-warn...

You would be unable to read an accurate pulse oximeter at 80% because you would have lost consciousness. Doctors have to worry about false negatives just as much as false positives with those things.

80% at sea level is very bad. 80% while asleep at 11,500 ft is not unusual. Ref: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10157825/

There’s a chart somewhere in there on mean sleep so2 by elevation

Big news for the 0.18% of the world’s population that lives above 11,500 feet, I guess.

The FDA standard for blood oxygen sensing is within 6% absolute, 95% of the time.

So variability in the sensing is pretty normal, and you want to look at long-term trends rather than individual measurements.

The problem with consumer health sensors is they have both high random error and inconsistent systematic error. When your SPO2 sensor gives you 92% one minute and 98% the next while you're sitting still and it is almost always 2% under, you're not getting "noisy but usable" data - you're getting garbage.

They should hide the live reading and give you daily / overnight insights.

That caused me nightmares when I was first diagnosed with sleep apnea. I would check my oxygen levels during the sleep to see if my treatment is effective. Even though the CPAP machine would show a few short events Apple Watch would show levels as low as 75%. Thankfully in my next sleep study I learned that my oxygen levels were consistently above 95% and the watch is indeed very unreliable (how snug it is, which direction it is facing etc highly affect the results).

I’ve always felt the sport loops (soft w/ velcro) provide the best contact with wrist while not being too cumbersome. Very easy to tighten just before a workout or loosen before bed. All the while it stays planted on my wrist. Unlock the rubbery band it normally comes with, which is prone to sliding around and less easy to adjust.

Out of curiosity, which band do you use?

I also switched to the sport one and I like it because I sweat a lot and use it while swimming and it dries quickly. But if I don’t wear it uncomfortably tight while sleeping it gets looser probably because I move a lot while sleeping. One thing I noticed is that the biggest drops in measured o2 levels happen while I wake up to go to the bathroom. Normally it only measures while your wrist is flat and the watch is facing up but it is probably not able to detect it that quickly.

In contrast my Garmin and finger pulseox match exactly.

I don't know what Garmin you have, but I'm about half convinced that my Instinct's heart rate measurement is implemented by a PRNG. It's frequently off by 50% from a count/time cross-check.

It does not inspire me to move up their range when this watch eventually dies: if they can't get the basic feature working, I have a hard time seeing how they're going to manage anything trickier.

Heart rate measurement on my Garmin (fenix 7 pro range) is great, the pulse ox measurements are shit though, and absolutely rinse the battery life.

Accuracy varies wildly with each model. Obviously the more expensive ($400+) ones are better, but Garmin devices are generally good with heart rate tracking. Same for Apple watch, Pixel watch, and a few cheaper options from Huawei and Xiaomi.

Heartrate is generally very good but only as long as the fit is tight. Blood oxygen on the other hand is a joke.

https://www.youtube.com/@TheQuantifiedScientist

That guy is a great reference, and through his videos you can find various measures where he compares devices against reference devices (e.g. the Polar H10 for heart rate for instance). A lot of the reliability of these devices relies upon a tight fit as well.

Yep, my Garmin also has matched the doctors office instrument to the 1% every time.

Which model do you have?

Epix Gen2 in 51mm

I really use the hell out of it. Yeah I can't play solitaire like an iWatch, but the battery lasts 7 days in the backcountry, the flashlight is unbelievably handy while hiking/camping/boondocking, and it helps me be healthy with all of the data. Being able to trigger my inReach is also a nice touch. It's definitely a tool rather than a fashion piece.

I've never had any trouble with it on my series 9 (purchased Dec 2023 just before the feature was disabled). It's always closely matched the fingertip meter that I have. Which is to say they both always read >= 95% for the most part.

Do you have tattoos? I find most sensors cannot read my vitals through my tattoos.

It may depend on skin type, body composition and wrist hair - perhaps the validation work used a skewed sample?

I’ve found the sensor to give stable results, with repeated measurements always within 2 percentage points.

And the results give qualitatively very reasonable data when I sleep at high altitude. The readings have a clear dependence on the elevation.

I haven’t cross checked against other meters, but my Apple Watch 9 sensor gives stable and reasonable results that match expected altitude trends. So yeah it may not be tuned to a wide enough variety of wrist types.

Indeed, just generally this is a silly feature that was used to sell updated devices, but has almost no value to end users. There is shockingly little diagnostic value of the reading unless you are in such a critical state that you likely want something better than an incredibly unreliable and inaccurate smartwatch feature cram.

For anyone remotely healthy, 100% of the time your real value will be between 95% and 99%, and there is almost no diagnostic value to it. Heart rate is actually interesting and is something you can learn from and work towards. SpO2 is just "eh...neat".

> For anyone remotely healthy, 100% of the time your real value will be between 95% and 99%, and there is almost no diagnostic value to it.

Sure, but if the value is less than 95, that does have diagnostic value (if it's accurate)

Sure, but unlike heart conditions where people often have no idea (about afib, or even abnormally high or low heart rates), people generally know when they have respiratory difficulties. Like the other comment noted something about family having pneumonia, and I cannot understand how the watch would have made their situation better. If someone in that state wasn't already seeking medical advice, it's hugely unlikely a watch saying "yo it's bad bro" is going to help.

It's like heralding a G-sensor in your watch telling you that you're falling. It's likely pretty obvious already.

Seems to me, it has some value (again, if it's accurate) for letting people know about sleep apnea; especially as part of an overall sleep tracking dodad.

I've got enough mild asthma around me that we have a finger pulseox (or two cause we "lost" one and found it later) and I've started yelling at sick people to check it once in a while. Cause they don't usually think to, but sometimes it lingers and by the time they decide to go into an office, the numbers are pretty low.

Of course, we're not on the Apple bandwagon and stopped wearing watches once we got used to having pocket watches again.

as some one whose family passed away due to pneumonia, spo2 is a life saving feature if we had that back then. probably 99.9% of the time spo2 number is good enough. but the value is really about the left 0.1% . of course the false positive rate should be low enough.

Wouldn't you already be super dead with a true reading of 80? Or at least unable to cognitively interpret the reading?

That's definitely a danger zone for healthy people but interestingly enough people with things like COPD may have a blood oxygen level in the 80s and while that is indicative of the disease, they may be totally stable and may not even need oxygen [1].

[1] https://www.drugs.com/medical-answers/normal-oxygen-level-so...

My grandmother's heart was completely fucked, so they'd have to adjust the alarms on the hospital monitors after checking their files when she went in. It's like "OK, well that's the problem... consults notes... Nope, apparently that is normal for her, now lets figure out what's actually wrong". It wasn't keeping regular time and it would sometimes skip, but apparently it was pumping well enough to keep her alive for several years.

Normal in humans is definitely relative and medicine has tended to assume that if we average 1000 humans (in too many cases, 1000 white college age men) that's what human normal is, which is crazy even beyond obvious problems like " people normally have 1.999 legs apparently".

Bodies are generally pretty amazing in that sense. As long as things go out of spec _slowly_, we will often adapt quite well. In the short term, we will tend to balance even fairly extreme changes out through various chemical processes and in the long term people can even develop heritable genetic changes. (E.g., how people acclimatize and have in some cases adapted to living at higher altitudes[0])

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_high_altitude_on_hu...

Obviously not. I did the experiment with a finger pulse ox and a Garmin device to check. You just hold your breath. My Apple watch was pretty good at it too. It's very uncomfortable and you'll get visual snow but I'm not dead, super or otherwise. Use your hand to clamp over your mouth and shut your nostrils if you want to try.

I had some momentary readings lower than 80 during a sleep study prior to going on CPAP. I didn't snore, or choke, or anything. Just ... didn't breathe. With CPAP, 98% all the time.

I never really understood why protecting Massimo in this situation was more important than allowing customers to access a feature in their watch. I get patent law is important, but they seemed more interested in rent-seeking from Apple than actually providing a desirable product that people could benefit from.

Patents are literally for rent-seeking.

They are explicitly not to maximize the number of people who can benefit from a product in the short term, but precisely to limit it so the inventor can make more money.

The idea being that in the long run the inventions it incentivizes outweigh the people who are limited from benefiting in the short term.

Judges aren't in the position to weigh societal benefits in each individual patent case. Your framing implies that cost-benefit tradeoff. But that's not how it works. The only question is whether a product infringes or not.

They are explicitly to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. In practice, I think the terms are now much too long and the lack of requirement to actually use or cheaply license a patent makes the system better at generating profits than fostering innovation.

"Rent seeking" is original intent of patents, correct? The theory being that this incentivizes invention.

Except the system overlearned and now it incentivizes invention of patents in lieu of actual inventions.

Wasn't patent law since decision wasn't decide in court. ITC banned it from imports. I don't understand how a government entity can wield so much power to block sales of product without using the court system. This should have been litigated.

Weird argument, as you could apply it to every patent issue in the world. Just as an example: Better video encoding is good for the world, so h264/hevc patents must be void.

The point of patents is to let larger companies produce products with your idea for a modest fee. You provide the world with an in-depth description of the thing you've come up with, so everyone can benefit, and in return you get to profit off your idea through license fees rather than just giving your idea away.

Apple pays tons of patent fees in all sorts of areas so tons of companies. They just thought this company was small enough that they could bully them into not having to pay. When that failed, they tried to crush them and force their hand.

While I'm against software patents on principle, Apple acting like some kind of stereotypical 80s movie evil corporation infuriates me just as much.

That's precisely what patents are for in the modern era

> I never really understood why protecting Massimo in this situation was more important than allowing customers to access a feature in their watch.

By that same logic, my landlord's interests and ownership of his property are categorically less important than allowing his tenants access to their apartments.

Which is, like, a way to structure a society, but is not the way that American society is structured.

Because Apple consciously violated the patent? When you think about it, Apple is lucky the judge didn't demand a hardware recall. They got off pretty easy, and if Apple wanted to be petty, then they could enable the hardware as an API only, and let users do the rest.

Here in America this is part of our culture: your health gimmeck features are precisely meaningless to the court if the prosecution can prove wreckless harm on Apple's behalf.

[dead]

Just offloading the analysis to the phone is extremely funny. It also seems like a pretty obvious solution, so I wonder if it was delayed by legal analysis and they only just decided it was likely to hold up in court.

Apple says:

> This update was enabled by a recent U.S. Customs ruling.

I can't find the ruling in question, though, so I'm not sure what they mean.

https://rulings.cbp.gov/ruling/H335304

This is the January 2024 ruling allowing Apple to resume imports of Apple Watches to the US with the blood oxygen feature disabled. Hopefully the recent ruling will show up on this site at some point.

Presumably they mean it was enabled by the bribe they publicly gave the US President last week, and he or his goons have told them to expect a favorable ruling soon.

I have it on my garmin and it seems pretty useless. My oxygen level while I sleep has more to do with how tightly I'm wearing it that night than anything else. It also drain the battery fast so I just disabled it.

I have a real finger-based one bought during COVID that I trust more.

Let's be clear: the return of this function requires an iPhone; the original version did not.

The Apple Watch already requires an iPhone for setup.

Right, but only for setup. The previous implementation would work if you went on a walk without your phone.

Hopefully blood glucose monitoring will come soon as well

I'm out of the loop, can this be done without drawing blood now?

It’s been going on for a while - Non-invasive monitoring. Here’s a general link https://www.google.com/search?q=blood+glucose+patent+startup

I believe a firm in Uk holds a patent for it and Apple has partnered with them a while ago.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-takes-key-step-towards-b...

This is pretty much the holy grail, that would make the first person to crack it crazy rich.

So the quick answer is: no, not even close. Also, you would somehow have to measure a very low concentration of soluble chemical in a fluid with always changing composition of a bunch of chemically similar other constituents across relatively wide tissue layers that themselves have a lot of that same chemical..

It's absolutely sci-fi.

To be clear, the research has been going on for a while.

But extracting an accurate enough signal from noise through the skin is an incredibly complex signal analysis problem. And there are multiple approaches.

Nothing has FDA approval yet because it's a major question whether any technology developed thus far is accurate enough. I understand there's at least one clinical trial going on right now. Fingers crossed...

Very neat! If they can crack this, I might actually bite and finally buy one.

You can do it by using interstitial fluid, which is how CGMs work.

But, in short, no, not yet: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/safety-communications/do...

Gotcha, thanks for the clarification and answer.

They're all on a subscription model, you're spending who-knows-how-much per year on a new sensor every few days/weeks. Afraid it'd feel like a prickleburr stuck to me constantly.

> They're all on a subscription model, you're spending who-knows-how-much per year on a new sensor every few days/weeks.

Which - to be clear - is because the sensor chemically degrades over time. It's not just rent-seeking; they genuinely don't know how to make one that'll last longer.

It does feel like that for some people (like myself). But it was fun and informative to wear it once for 10 days.

When I used one I didn't notice it was there except when I inadvertently brushed it against something.

I'm the ADD type that runs into shit, or at least I clip corners regularly when going through doorways. Normally... I don't even notice. Ripped two CGM's out in the first month. Shit HURTS.

Tried both of the popular ones: didn't notice either one ever.

i'm not a smartwatch fan for the most part but i'd get one for CGM use if it meant no more knocking my sensors off walking through doors (because i'm apparently incapable of walking without moving like a wacky inflatable tube man) or nasty adhesive residue stuck on my arms.

A family member has one of these watches. Instant hypochondriac. Probably already was but the watch really brought it out. They're constantly monitoring their vitals rather than getting on with life and have already made more than one ER visit on account of a reading that worried them.

What's different in Samsung's approach, that kept them out of this dispute? Why didn't Apple follow Samsung's solution, if not patent restricted?

What's the US Customs ruling in question? > This update was enabled by a recent U.S. Customs ruling.

https://rulings.cbp.gov/ruling/H335304 maybe this - from January 2025

It appears the patent is for "User-Worn Device for Noninvasively Measuring a Physiological Parameter of a User". So Apple is simply moving the logic to a non user-worn device - like a phone - to get around the problem. (this is my quick read / conjecture)

Here is the original patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US10912502B2/en

Yeah, prob because one cannot patent an algorithm itself, but only a specific implementation. The patent was about a wearable device so i guess the workaround was to do the computations in a non-wearable device.

That this is okay?

Did the Watch Series 9+ incorporate a new sensor or different algorithm? I have an older model that has always had blood oxygen (and it was never disabled, as it was for the 9+).

Apple only disabled the pulse ox sensor on watches they sold, distributed, or replaced after the ruling. I don't think Apple disabled a working pulse ox sensor on anyone's watch other than repairs.

And only in the USA, as far as I understood. You could but the same watch in Canada and the pulseox worked.

Don't get me started about my Kindle books....

BTW the O2 monitoring is inaccurate and unreliable compared to a proper pulse oximeter.

AFAIK most pulse oximeters themselves are plenty inaccurate (these "stick-on-your-finger" kinds), as they all work by the same mechanism.

Interesting they offload the processing to iphone. The Soc on apple watch is quite capable. Maybe they don't want to drain your AW battery and prefer draining your iphone's instead.

AFAIK this is a legal loophole to avoid a patent. It used to work on the watch itself, but was disabled in the US due to said patent.

Been holding off buying a watch till glucose monitoring hits.

Much like fusion that is continuously imminent though

That would be amazing, but it seems like that tech is still a ways off. At least to have any sort of useful accuracy. The wrist "temp" is a great example of "interesting but useless".

Rumors have it that some form of BP monitoring will appear in next month's updated watches.

I would bet on nuclear fusion existing first..

I have the first Ultra and just looked back at the data and they were never interrupted. It isn't included in the release either. Wonder what is different about it. Did apple arrive at a separate agreement for that device?

If you have a watch that was imported into the US before the restriction went into effect, you never lost the (original, watch-only) Blood Oxygen functionality and this update doesn't affect you.

Up to mid-2024, Costco was selling 2 separate SKUs of Apple Watch Ultra 2: watches with the blood oxygen feature and watches imported after the cutoff which were missing the feature.

A limitation of this workaround is that it only works on recent watches. If you are in the unfortunate position of getting a Series 6, 7, 8 watch replaced by Apple, they'll give you a replacement with the feature missing, and this update doesn't "fix" it..

There was an import ban on Apple Watches that had the feature, and the import ban was lifted by disabling the feature on imported watches.

There wasn't a requirement that it be disabled on watches that had already been imported, or on watches that weren't being imported to the US.

I wish they could monitor blood insulin.

Can you do anything interesting with knowing blood oxygen?

Why were they removed in the first place?

To be honest, I didn’t like these metrics. They’re very different from what I get on an oximeter. The first time I saw them, I thought I was short of breath, but it was just the metric being used.

Massimo invented this technology (yay Massimo!) in the 90s yet their Japanese patents [1] weren't considered prior art (WTF?) because of technical legal reasons.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/JP2002542493A5/en%EF%BF%BC

So I suppose if Massimo is going to use a technical legality to extend then Apple can use a technical legality to avoid.

Masimo only refined pulse oximetry in the 90s, as pulse oximetry was invented in the 1970s (prior oximeters did not resemble the devices seen today). Everything after that has been tweaks/improvements to the base method, but I wouldn't call them the inventors of the technology.

The only IP that companies can own now are specific methods/improvements, not the base idea of measuring SpO2 with light. All Apple has to do is avoid the specific improvements that Masimo owns and they are fine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_oximetry#History

Yes. I recall the brand new pulse oximeters (I don't recall the manufacturer) that appeared in the ORs at UCLA Medical Center right around when I started my anesthesiology residency in 1977. They were SUPER expensive when they first came out, so much so that our department bought 3 of them, which were used only for the most critical cases. I remember the chief resident sometimes had to decide who got one when 2 residents/attendings each said their patient was more unstable/critical and thus needed it more.

These were NOT small devices like the inexpensive fingertip versions you can buy now over the counter; rather, they were big boxlike machines, perhaps 2 feet x 1.5 feet x 8 inches high. They were SO heavy (I'd estimate 25 pounds) they were attached to a stainless steel rolling cart.

They cost $10,000-$15,000.

In today's dollars, that's $54,000-$80,000.

That is interesting, had not understood this previously.

Which will be absolutely useless for anyone serious and even plebs like me since who runs with a 250-500g phone strapped into spandex?

I use a watch and wireless headphones. The iphone stays at home.

You can buy a fingertip pulse oximeter for like $10. I understand the benefits of having all of these biometric readers directly on your personal device, but the perceived stress over getting this back into the watch seems... I don't know, not wise? In poor taste? Something, but I can't articulate it well.

I mean, we don't have IR blasters on any of our personal devices anymore, and arguably it would be nice to be able to control my TV with my phone like I could with my Palm Pilot forever ago, but that's not in vogue anymore.

The point of this is that for people who would never get a pulse oximeter getting this "for free" and automatically enabled on their Apple Watches and realizing they have a medical issue well before symptoms become severe or catastrophic.

iPhone can control Apple TVs, and is able to detect which device you are nearest to and auto select it (if you have multiple)

Also all my TVs also have apps that function as a remote control.

Interestingly enough my main TV an LG has a remote that controls the tv using RF. I don’t even know if it would work with an IR blaster.

Apple Watch can also control Apple TVs.

blood oxygen from the wrist is absolutely garbage-in

I live in a rural area. My old fashioned doctor said to test oxygen levels, all you need to do is pinch your index finger nail down until it goes white. Then when you let go, if it goes back to pink right away, you're good. If it takes more than a few seconds, you're not good.

That's the capillary refill test which tests circulation and perfusion. Doesn't really tell you anything about oxygen levels.

Of course. Billions of people have lived without this. You also don’t need a computer on your wrist.

But many people are willing to pay get more health information, especially wealthier demographics who have interest in health and appearances of health.