The Apple-Masimo saga is long and has many plot twists.
Apple, and the Apple Watch in particular, were hit with a legal one-two punch Friday. A jury found against the gadget titan, ordering it to pay $634 million to the health tech company Masimo, while on the same day the U.S. International Trade Commission announced it will reexamine whether it may want to impose an import ban on Apple Watches—also due to Masimo-related concerns.
It’s a huge dual victory for Masimo, whose multi-year legal war on Apple is sprawling and seemingly endless.
Apple gave a statement to Yahoo Finance to that effect. A representative said “Over the past six years” Massimo has sued in multiple courts, and “asserted over 25 patents, the majority of which have been found to be invalid.” The verdict in this case concerns a patent, which Apple claims, “expired in 2022, and is specific to historic patient monitoring technology from decades ago.”
In 2024, Apple simply got rid of the blood oxygen monitor feature in order to get around the import ban. Yhe redesigned Apple Watches now under renewed ITC scrutiny are not the ones the jury just found infringed on Masimo’s patents.
