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Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

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

#181

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…

> 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.)

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

> 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.

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

#183
post #150

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".

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

#184
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yea…

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 fo…

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).

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

#185
post #2

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…

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.

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

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#187
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.

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.

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

#188
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#189

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…

>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?

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