this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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Really wonder what exactly Apple is planning/trying to do here. They have more than enough money to settle with Masimo - IMO it makes the most sense for them to just settle an amount for the existing watches, and redesign a new oxygen sensor module for the US market.
Kind of silly for them to expect some kind of special treatment ripping off another company's tech, when they themselves are hyper protective over copycats ripping them off
Maybe the sales figures were less than expected and will use this as an excuse to the board.
Well, if I was on the board or a shareholder, I would be much more pissed about patent infringment that should have been easy to prevent and hints at incompetence over lower than expected sales which is just hard to predict.
If you were an invester or board member, you wouldn't care about the patent infringement - Apple has historically done this and you wouldn't invest in the first place if you weren't okay with it. This one's just getting more eyeballs and actual repurcussions but they've paid off and bought out multiple companies over stuff like this.
Not about infringement as much as getting caught and not being able to sell the watches that were surely expensive to develop.
If I were an investor I would be much more lenient with the excuse that the market is saturated than the excuse that we're too incompetent to even maintain a presence in the market.
Investors are not fans. They're not going to take the nice sounding option, just because it's the nice option. They will demand competence at the top and they won't pussy foot around the issue. Especially with the amount of money the CEO is paid.
If he's getting 100 bazillion dollars a year he better damn well do something for it and one of those things is not getting the company involved in a stupid lawsuit which has prevented sales of a highly profitable product in a highly lucrative market, when making it go away would have cost about 1/1000 of 1% of the Apple's net income.
They also have more than enough money to drain Masimo by dragging them through legal proceedings, so Apple can just swoop in and buy them out.
But there's no reason for Apple to do that it would have been cheaper for them to just pay for the license. I think they didn't think they'd get called out on it, and now they don't know what to do.
I'm not sure how big Masimo is, but they probably have reasonably deep pockets too considering they manufacture and sell a ton of hospital equipment.
If Apple wanted to buy out Masimo it certainly wouldn't be cheap, and would probably upset their shareholders, but they do have the money
What if they wanted to buy them from the start and are thinking they can drop the price?
If they fold now, what message will it send to other companies that have patents that Apple infringes on?