On Monday, December 20, Apple announced that it was halting sales of two of its three Apple Watch models in the United States with almost immediate effect. You can read full details here.
Apple Watch Ultra 2, one of two Watches facing a sales ban in the U.S. this week.
Online sales of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 from apple.com will cease in a matter of hours, at 3 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, December 21, while instore sales of the same models will halt on Sunday, December 24, at the end of the business day. It’s now emerged that Apple is on an unprecedented “rescue mission” to get the smartwatches on sale again.
That’s according to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, who has today said that Apple is “racing to make changes to algorithms on the device that measure a user’s blood oxygen level—a feature that Masimo Corp. has argued infringes its patents.”
This is the long-running patent case which in October was decided in Masimo’s favor, and has led to Apple stopping sales to comply.
Gurman goes on, “It’s a high-stakes engineering effort unlike any Apple has undertaken before. Though the iPhone maker’s products have previously been barred in certain countries over legal disputes, this restriction would hit one of Apple’s biggest moneymakers in its home country — on Christmas no less. Without a last-minute veto by the White House, a ban imposed by the International Trade Commission will take effect on Dec. 25.”
The work is focused on software changes in the hope that this, rather than an overhaul of hardware, will be enough to overcome the ban, though as Gurman says, “the patents at the heart of the dispute are mostly related to hardware, including how light is emitted into the skin to measure the amount of oxygen in a person’s blood.”
Apple has said that it is getting ready to submit a workaround but Masimo claims that a software fix will be insufficient and the hardware needs to change.
If hardware changes have to happen, that will be a lengthy process, with one source claiming it would take at least three months to get new models produced and shipped.
It is still possible that the Biden administration could veto the decision. This has happened before when the Obama administration vetoed a ban on the iPhone in 2013, but that fight was with Samsung, a South Korean firm, while Maismo is, “located in Irvine, California, which means the government would have to pick one US company over another.”
The conclusion remains the same: if you want to buy an Apple Watch from Apple and it’s the Series 9, Ultra 2 or the Series 8 (currently sold as a refurbished option) that you’re after, there’s no time to lose. If you fancy the more affordable Apple Watch SE, there’s no problem as that’s unaffected.
And just to reiterate, anyone who owns an Apple Watch that does blood oxygen monitoring is also unaffected—the ban only affects new sales.
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