The Apple Watch sensor saga is over. Did everyone lose?

Like many great empires, Apple started out, and in some ways continues to view itself, as the little guy rebelling against The Man. A couple of upstarts in a garage taking on the might of IBM. The plucky Mac defeating all-powerful Big Brother. Think Different. It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy. The company’s founding myth is David versus Goliath, with Cupertino firmly in the sling-based role. The reality, of course, is rather different.

Most of the time, at least these days, Apple can do pretty much what it wants. It has a lot of money (like, a serious amount of the stuff, an almost unimaginable pile. Scrooge McDuck quantities) and armies of lawyers and millions of passionate fans and huge political influence and friends in high places. It’s quite alarming how far those things can get you.

So it was surprising last year when Apple found a problem it couldn’t solve by just being bigger and richer and more powerful than its opponent. A medtech company named Masimo complained that the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 featured blood-oxygen sensors that violated its patents; the U.S. International Trade Commission agreed, and Apple, shockingly, ended up having to briefly pause sales of those products. It was able to bring them back a little later, but only after software-blocking that functionality and removing one of the smartwatch’s best features.

Apple watchers could be forgiven for assuming that, at some stage, everything would revert to the status quo. That someone would pop up to say, “Whoops, sorry for the confusion, not sure what went wrong there,” but naturally, Apple is allowed to do whatever it likes. But this just… didn’t happen.

The closest the company came to victory was the announcement last week, after almost 20 months of reduced functionality and disrupted sales, that blood-oxygen measurement has returned to the Series 9, 10, and Ultra 2. But it’s not the same as before. Apple calls the feature “redesigned,” and it’s arguably worse. You can still take a reading and track your levels throughout the day, but you’ll need to consult your iPhone to get any data.

Have these shenanigans damaged Apple? Of course. Losing a headline health feature for the better part of two years can only be negative. Returning it to watches in a worse state is frustrating. Is the damage mortal? Of course not, although it’s hard to measure because of the way the company reports revenue, and because we can hardly go around asking customers why they did or didn’t make a purchase.

In Q1 2024, which includes that week of the watches being unavailable at Apple.com, Wearables/Home/Accessories revenue was down 11.3 percent year on year. And in Q2 2024, which covers the three months after Apple removed blood-oxygen measurement, revenue was down 9.6 percent. Those numbers may reflect the Series 9 being very similar to its predecessors, and perhaps ructions elsewhere in that broad product category. But it seems safe to assume that at least some Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales were lost as a result of the Masimo affair.

Then again, it’s not like Masimo fared much better. It doesn’t appear to have received any kind of payoff, the publicity has been almost entirely negative, and battling a company of Apple’s size in court is a drain on time, money, and executive focus. Last September, Masimo said goodbye to the chairman/CEO who did so much to trigger and aggravate the dispute, and while that wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the resignation announcement, it seems fair to say that jettisoning your leader isn’t a sign of a company that’s on top of the world.

But Apple Watch users have lost the most. Those who bought an Apple Watch before January 2024 were lucky enough to keep the blood-oxygen feature—things never reached the stage of remotely disabling the sensor on existing watches—but anyone who bought a new model after was stuck with an incomplete feature set. Not to mention that Apple was unable to make any positive updates to the feature, or develop new applications for the sensor.

Other than lawyers, in other words, nobody won. The entire saga was just a bad idea from beginning to end, draining resources from both parties and generating resentment throughout the user base and negative PR everywhere else. Which makes me wonder how it got this far.

Presumably, Masimo thought it had a legitimate case, and expected Apple to pay the “make this go away” fee; presumably, Apple thought that would set a bad precedent and encourage similar complaints in the future, so it decided to call Masimo’s bluff. But surely once Masimo carried on with its suit, and especially once the ITC made its feelings clear, it was time for Apple to be sensible and play nicely. Then again, perhaps the somewhat inflammatory language used by Masimo’s former CEO put paid to that idea.

It just goes to show, I suppose, that even very powerful and successful companies are prone to misjudgments. That making the best product is not necessarily the absolute first priority all of the time. And that occasionally, it isn’t David or Goliath that wins the battle, but the guy who sells snacks at halftime.

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

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