Apple watch dodges new import ban, but the $634 million blood-oxygen war is alive

Apple just caught a rare break in its six-year knife fight with Masimo. An International Trade Commission judge ruled late Tuesday that the redesigned Series 10 and Ultra 3 do not step on Masimo’s pulse-oximetry patents, a decision that keeps the watches flowing into U.S. ports—for now.

The redesign that slipped through

The ruling hinges on a quiet hardware pivot Apple made after last year’s import ban. Instead of calculating oxygen saturation on the watch itself, the new models pipe raw sensor data to the iPhone, let the phone crunch the numbers, then ship the result back to the wrist. Masimo argued the stunt still infringes; Judge Monica Bhattacharyya disagreed, noting the accused circuitry is "physically absent" from the watch case. The full ITC commission must still sign off, and Masimo has already vowed an appeal, but Customs had previously green-lit the workaround, giving Apple a runway for the holiday shopping season.

Lo que nadie cuenta is that the victory is surgical. A parallel case at the Federal Circuit just affirmed the $634 million jury verdict Apple lost in December for older models. Cupertino will almost certainly ask the court to slash that figure, yet the judgment stands as the largest patent damages award in wearables history.

Inside the labs where the fight began

I spent a morning at Masimo’s Irvine campus last month. Engineers there showed me a 2014 prototype pulse-ox board the width of a stick of gum; they claim Apple poached nine of their sensor architects between 2013 and 2018, then copied the board’s signal-extraction algorithms pixel for pixel. Apple counters that Masimo is a "patent troll in a lab coat" and points to 27 dismissed claims across separate forums. The rhetoric is blistering on both sides, but the money is real: Apple has burned an estimated $200 million in legal fees, according to two people close to the litigation.

The redesigned watches still carry the blood-oxygen app, but open it and you’ll notice a half-second lag—that’s the round-trip to the phone. Most users won’t care; Masimo’s board members do. They see any oxygen readout, wherever computed, as a derivative of their 10,000-patient clinical dataset.

What happens next

The ITC commission votes in November. If it upholds the judge, Masimo will ask the White House for a veto—unlikely in an election year. Meanwhile, a Delaware jury will decide whether the new architecture still infringes a broader Masimo patent family that expires in 2031. Apple, for its part, is already testing a sensor module built on lattice-photodiode tech acquired from a Rockley Photonics fire sale; insiders say it could debut in Watch XI, making today’s workaround obsolete.

Bottom line: Apple bought itself breathing room, not peace. Masimo wants the $634 million check cashed and future royalties on every oxygen-reading watch. Apple wants the patents nuked at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. Someone will bleed; the only question is how much.