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According to the Massimo CEO, Apple has not made any offer whatsoever to resolve this.
I don't know when this was said but wouldn't offering to resolve be acknowledgement that there was infringement on Apple's part? Maybe now there will be willing to negotiate something
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Or trifling matters like clips working on an entirely different principle (transmission vice reflection) than the method which remains patent encumbered.
Certainly it works on a different principle than that which is patented. At the same time, IANAL, and if the stakes are large enough the question might need an adjudicated answer.
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It's also happening because after some failed negotiations Apple just straight up started poaching employee talent from Massimo.
This is a good thing. It increases salaries for everyone. If Apple can make more money with your ideas than Massimo, why shouldn't they be allowed to pay you more?
Not always and not for everyone. Follow me: Currently there are two players in this space competing for talent, Apple and Massimo. This competition results in higher wages and more innovation. What do you think will happen to wages and innovation if Apple just guts Massimo(or any other company) and now there's only one player on the market, Apple? Now Apple can pay you whatever they want because you have nowhere else to go.
How do I know this? Because years and years ago, two major semiconductor companies had offices in my home town. And workers would get pay raises by jumping ship between the two. A few years ago, one of the bigger corps. bought the other smaller one becoming an even bigger behemoth, so the offices had to merge, leading to layoffs in the name of cutting the redundant jobs and "optimizing efficiency". What do you think happened to the wages at the new giant company? Did they go up or not?
So, I question the thought process of HNers who support that Apple crushing a smaller player out of a market somehow leads to higher salaries for everyone. If you want higher salaries, you need more players in that market, not one giant monopolist. This isn't Apple vs some equal Goliath like Google or Microsoft who can afford to fight fire with fire.
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> That's misunderstanding the argument: it's not "They poached our employees and that isn't fair!", it's "Clearly our technology was legitimate and innovative, they had to poach our employees to duplicate it!" This seems a pretty thin argument. Hiring some people who already successfully did it has a higher chance of success than hiring randos, even if they have to do a clean-room re-implementation. So of course you'…
> This seems a pretty thin argument. Hiring some people who already successfully did it has a higher chance of success than hiring randos, even if they have to do a clean-room re-implementation. That's... literally the argument. If the patent was obvious to a practitioner in the field, you wouldn't need to hire experts. And not just any experts, experts from the company that holds the patent in question! Honestly thi…
I can very easily see a case where it's obvious to anyone who's worked on this sort of device before, but only 1-2 companies make that sort of device, so if you want to hire someone to make that sort of device without starting from literally 0 experience, it would have to be from one of the few companies that have patents in that field.
Once you're talking about specific methods of accomplishing a specific task in a field, there aren't that many experts or practitioners.
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But the amount of processing necessary to trigger the patent is "any amount more than zero". Here's what claim 19, which Apple was adjudged to have indirectly violated, says about processing: > [the user-worn device comprising, among other things: ] one or more processors configured to receive one or more signals from at least one of the four photodiodes and output measurements responsive to the one or more signals,…
It's funny how these things work. They don't even specify the wavelength of the LEDs used, instead preferring to patent any wavelength imaginable. But obviously not all of them will work. Why was this allowed in a patent? How is this a valid description of what they built?
If you built it with wavelengths that worked, it'd be covered by the patent. If you built it with wavelengths that didn't work, it'd probably be useless.
What no one's mentioned here is: this is an International Trade Commission ruling, not a US court or PTO ruling. So Apple cannot import those watches. They could probably build them in the US (now there's a thought), and injunctions against domestic products are possible but very unusual. Usually there are damages, not injunctions.
Apple can't build a factory to produce Apple Watches before the entire situation would be resolved. And if they could, it would be much more expensive to run compared to making it in Vietnam (where they make it now). It would just be a stopgap solution.
Of course, they'll have run the numbers and the cost of this fiasco is likely many-many orders of magnitude below the savings from using cheap labour.
What no one's mentioned here is: this is an International Trade Commission ruling, not a US court or PTO ruling. So Apple cannot import those watches. They could probably build them in the US (now there's a thought), and injunctions against domestic products are possible but very unusual. Usually there are damages, not injunctions.
Apple can't build a factory to produce Apple Watches before the entire situation would be resolved. And if they could, it would be much more expensive to run compared to making it in Vietnam (where they make it now). It would just be a stopgap solution.
I'm sure almost every state in the US would offer incentives to locate the plant there.
Is there a chance Apple will pay Masimo for the technology and resume sales? I am curious why that didn’t happen. If this is an exec’s decision and this leads to bigger losses than paying Masimo, I wonder what would happen the people involved in the decisions.
There's a chance. This is likely Apple exhausting options before it settles into a licensing deal. First you try cease-and-desist, then appeals, then settlement, then import restriction negotiation, etc. Obviously Apple does not want to pay a fee per watch for the technology. They say they're going to try to fix it in software, Masimo says it's a hardware thing. Apparently this whole thing happened because Masimo sta…
I don't think many of us have ever seen this step.