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Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

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Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#391

Post by jojobas »

ffgjgf1 wrote: post #384
t0mas88 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that was the only innovation, why would Apple go and have several meetings with them and then try to hire their engineers? Sounds like they had something that Apple wanted, and Apple decided not to pay for it. This case is the result, which certainly will be settled at some point.

Well they might have seen the patents and just had meetings because of that. > with them and then try to hire their engineers This doesn’t seem to be particularly relevant. Apple was trying to entire a new field so they hired people who already work in it

I guess if Apple started harvesting live human tissue for use in their gadgets you'd have some justification for it too.

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#392

Post by ffgjgf1 »

ajross wrote: post #104
speedylight wrote: post #55

Since Masimo is a publicly traded company, can’t Apple just buy enough shares to have a controlling interest in the company and just force them to back out?

Others are answering this with more specifics, but there's a first principles answer here too: not without facing a shareholder lawsuit for the difference. The whole idea behind owning stock in the company is that the company acts to maximize the value of that stock on your behalf. So if the ownership of the company (Apple Computer, in this case) takes a deliberate act that fails to honor the shareholder compact (tak…

If Apple ever bought Masimo it would be either merged into Apple or operate as a subsidiary.

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#393

Post by ffgjgf1 »

willio58 wrote: post #243
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was probably much cheaper to just gut their consumer engineering team instead. The whole company is focused a lot on medical devices Apple wants no part of, they just want the consumer part. Though it feels like an oversight to me. In this field, like in telecom modems, patents mean a lot, so I also wonder why didn't Apple seek to buy out the consumer part of Masimo along with their patent portfolio. Maybe they di…

Yeah it seems like it was cheaper in the short run but will likely be extremely expensive in the long-run. - loss of sales of watches - either battling in court for who knows how long or settling out of court for god knows how much money. The real move would have been to just.. Grow a team internally. I mean come on, ox sensors? They couldn't have figured that out without poaching a well established med-tech company?

> mean come on, ox sensors

Yes and they would still be protected by those silly patents no matter who Apple hired

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#394

Post by ffgjgf1 »

jojobas wrote: post #391
ffgjgf1 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they might have seen the patents and just had meetings because of that. > with them and then try to hire their engineers This doesn’t seem to be particularly relevant. Apple was trying to entire a new field so they hired people who already work in it

I guess if Apple started harvesting live human tissue for use in their gadgets you'd have some justification for it too.

I see you have weird imagination. What even makes you say something as silly as this without any provocation?

I don’t care particularly about Apple or their watches. Yet even Apple can’t win against a patent troll that means any smaller company would never be able to develop and sell their products without paying Masimo.

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#395

Post by mort96 »

caminante wrote: post #220
taeric wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorta? Compulsive licensing is something that only exists in a very narrow market for copyright material. Pretty sure it does not exist at all for patents. You can argue that it is somewhat moot here, as Apple was not showing any willingness to negotiate. But the post above is somewhat accurate, in that there is no guarantee that negotiations will end in a license.

> But the post above is somewhat accurate, in that there is no guarantee that negotiations will end in a license. Why is that revelation "wild?" Imagine saying, > It’s so wild that [Bernie] is allowed to refuse to [allow Bob] to [rent Bernie's spare bedroom]. putting aside the fact that [Bob] doesn't even want to rent from [Bernie] as applied to the situation here with the watches! :-)

The patent isn't personal property that the company "owns" like how a person owns a house, it's a segment of the market where the government grants a company a legal monopoly. I don't understand why it should be a total legal monopoly. If the idea was that the company which employed the people who invented something cool should "deserve" to get filthy rich (why do we want that again?), you'd think that could be achieved by forcing other companies who want to be in the same space to pay money to the company which employed the inventors.

But instead we apparently want to say, "no other company should be allowed to make a watch with a pulse oximeter for 20 years unless the company which employed the inventor agrees to it". Why?

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#396

Post by ffgjgf1 »

jojobas wrote: post #386
ffgjgf1 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reward Masimo for their innovation Except there doesn’t seem to be particularly innovative about those patents. Masimo just excepts to be rewarded for filling them..

This seems to be an uninformed opinion. Masimo has been on the cutting edge of pulse-oximetry for decades, and figuring out how to make a low power wrist pulse-oximeter is non-trivial.

Maybe. These patents seem pretty trivial though.

> Masimo has been on the cutting edge of pulse-oximetry

Maybe because they built an artificial patent moat around themselves and no other company can compete?

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#397

Post by [deleted] »

caslon wrote: post #366
oblio wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incredibly scummy.

Why is it scummy? Hiring people to produce goods or services and compensating them based on the value of their knowledge and abilities is sort of the entire value pitch of capitalism, and it's unlikely anyone would have moved over to Apple if the compensation wasn't more worthwhile to them.

[deleted]

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#398

Post by mort96 »

Retric wrote: post #294
hedora wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though that was a design patent, they also got a normal patent for the pythagorean formula (they didn’t invent pinch zoom, so they patented computing the distance between two fingers from two x,y coordinates).

FYI: Apple’s pinch to zoom lets you rotate and drag not just zoom. This kind of subtle differences matter quite a bit from a UI perspective. You could have a punch to zoom system where a pinching motion always resulted in fixed changes to zoom levels. You could describe both implementations as “pint to zoom” but one is a lot more user friendly than the other.

I can't rotate web pages in Safari, there's plenty of situations in Apple's first party apps in iOS where pinch to zoom is purely a zoom thing.

In any case, the rotation thing is also just pretty rudimentary trigonometry/linear algebra.

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#399

Post by mort96 »

onion2k wrote: post #361
boxed wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe they are obvious, just that you don't start a product with all possible optimizations. You get the initial version out, then you iterate.

You get the initial version out, then you iterate. "You launch a product that doesn't work and then you fix it later" is a common strategy but it really shouldn't be.

Do you have any sources which demonstrate that the initial version didn't work?

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#400

Post by mort96 »

jojobas wrote: post #297
pembrook wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some narrow cases I see the value in patents motivating financial investment in original research. But most of the time this does not apply. Optical pulse oximeters are an obvious incremental thing, and with zero knowledge of the space I don’t think it’s crazy to believe these would have come into existence on the same time frame with or without the existence of patents. Virtually everything humans create or “disc…

>Virtually everything humans create or “discover” is an inevitability. Even though it's inevitable that someone will invest a lot of time to get us better TFT displays in form of IPS, it's very much favorable that he can reap some reward for it. It's a bit of a gamble and is therefore supplanted by the trade secret and research grant systems, still it's a useful incentive to do cool stuff.

There is no "he" who will reap the reward. The reward all goes to the share holders and executives of the company which ends up owning the patent, not the individual or individuals who comes up with the thing which can be patented.
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