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If blood oxygen is disabled in a software update, will there be any recourse for Apple Watch owners? Customers aren’t the ones who violated a patent, and yet t

If blood oxygen is disabled in a software update, will there be any recourse for Apple Watch owners? Customers aren’t the ones who violated a patent, and yet they’re the ones who might get screwed. The burden should be on Apple to figure this out for their customers.

burnte 3y ago
Apple could always pay to use the patented IP. I could barely type that with a straight face. They'll never do that after being sued.
- fritzo 3y ago
  Honest question: why not? Would that set a precedent and invite a deluge of lawsuits from every direction?
  - burnte 3y ago
    No, it's just that Apple has a history of cutting off companies permanently. Once they decide not to do business with you, you're done and they'll do what they have to in order to avoid using you. In this case, I wager they'd rather engineer around this patent holder than pay them since they took the risk of going to production without licensing the patent.
gnicholas 3y ago
The current ITC action would not result in this. The ITC only affects importation into the US.
- dandesim 3y ago
  Apple does JIT assembly, so it would be relatively 'easy' to release a new/factory OS version that has this feature disabled. Take the marketing of this feature down, or mark it as in development, and should be okay? I don't know why they haven't just done the simple solution yet and are instead fighting this in court, continuing to lose sales, for a feature .1% of people will use?
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    I believe they tried to do this early on and discovered that a software-only fix is not sufficient to defeat the import ban. That's because the import ban covers devices that have the particular hardware, which these devices would still have. I do agree that it is odd to have such a big fight over a feature that so few people use. But Apple's behavior is consistent with this notion — they don't want to pay Massimo much because people don't really care about the feature. Therefore Apple isn't willing to pay much of a license fee for it. Of course, it's likely that if Apple had this tech in the clear, they would have promoted it much more, and made it more prominent to the users. They probably hesitate to market the feature that prominently because they don't want to end up with a huge patent verdict against them, on the grounds that it's an important part of their newer watches. They'd rather it look like "just another one of many features" on the watch, which would command a modest royalty.

burnte 3y ago

Apple could always pay to use the patented IP. I could barely type that with a straight face. They'll never do that after being sued.

fritzo 3y ago
Honest question: why not? Would that set a precedent and invite a deluge of lawsuits from every direction?
- burnte 3y ago
  No, it's just that Apple has a history of cutting off companies permanently. Once they decide not to do business with you, you're done and they'll do what they have to in order to avoid using you. In this case, I wager they'd rather engineer around this patent holder than pay them since they took the risk of going to production without licensing the patent.

gnicholas 3y ago

The current ITC action would not result in this. The ITC only affects importation into the US.

dandesim 3y ago
Apple does JIT assembly, so it would be relatively 'easy' to release a new/factory OS version that has this feature disabled. Take the marketing of this feature down, or mark it as in development, and should be okay? I don't know why they haven't just done the simple solution yet and are instead fighting this in court, continuing to lose sales, for a feature .1% of people will use?
- gnicholas 3y ago
  I believe they tried to do this early on and discovered that a software-only fix is not sufficient to defeat the import ban. That's because the import ban covers devices that have the particular hardware, which these devices would still have. I do agree that it is odd to have such a big fight over a feature that so few people use. But Apple's behavior is consistent with this notion — they don't want to pay Massimo much because people don't really care about the feature. Therefore Apple isn't willing to pay much of a license fee for it. Of course, it's likely that if Apple had this tech in the clear, they would have promoted it much more, and made it more prominent to the users. They probably hesitate to market the feature that prominently because they don't want to end up with a huge patent verdict against them, on the grounds that it's an important part of their newer watches. They'd rather it look like "just another one of many features" on the watch, which would command a modest royalty.