Apple shows no sign of restoring its blood-oxygen feature to US watches, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says in his latest “Power On” newsletter.
Around the start of 2024, due to a patent infringement lawsuit from Masimo Corp,. the Apple Watch’s blood-oxygen monitoring feature was banned from devices sold in the US. The technology had only been added a few years earlier, as the primary upgrade in the Apple Watch Series 6 in 2020. Now, for new buyers, the feature is gone.
“The company [Apple] often touts itself as a health-care leader and tries to position its smartwatch as a medical lab on your wrist. But blood oxygen is an important metric for many people, and its omission from US devices is hard to ignore,” Gurman writes. “Apple, the world’s most valuable company, has the money to settle the suit or rebuild the feature in a way that dances around Masimo’s patents. It has chosen, so far, to do neither.”
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