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Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

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131–140 of 357 posts

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#133
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%…

> 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.

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#134

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.

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.

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#136

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.

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

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 . How people on HN can support monopolization of markets and killing of competition is beyond me, since in the end it always bites them i…

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.

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”?

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

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#140
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.
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