Apple is now banned from selling its latest Apple Watches in the US::Apple can no longer sell the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Watch Series 9 in the US. The International Trade Commission issued an import ban on the devices that took effect on December 26th, 2023.
Ooh gotta love when they get a taste of their own poison. They’ve blocked import of so many devices resembling theirs or third party made spare parts to control the market and now it’s coming around to bite them in the ass.
Except now it’s because of a patent dispute instead of “because I said so!”
The ban only affects Apple stores in the US. That means customers can still get their hands on a Watch Series 9 or Watch Ultra 2 at Best Buy, Target, and other retailers while supplies last. Apple will also continue selling the Watch SE, as it doesn’t come with a blood oxygen sensor.
That seems a bit lax.
Well… That’s actually probably fair as stated.
BestBuy etc don’t sell Apple’s products on commission, they bought them from Apple for a wholesale price, they’ve got them in a warehouse and on shelves right now on their dime, and the only way they make that money back is by selling them.
And the only way Apple makes money from a product being sold at Best Buy is that Best Buy will likely buy more stock to replace the stuff they sold, and they’ll buy that from Apple.
So if it was banned everywhere it would be unfair to the retailers that already paid Apple for a product they now can’t recoup, and it wouldn’t impact Apple at all because they already made their money from Best Buy.
This way the retailers can get their money back, but can’t get any more, which means only Apple is impacted.
The only other way that’s semi-fair (but would be extreme) would be for Apple to be forced to do a recall or something and reimburse all the retailers the money they had already spent. Doable, and definitely more of a punishment for Apple, but a lot of extra work for everyone if the outcome of this is that Apple settles and then everyone can just go back to ordering more again.
What would be interesting to see would be to force apple to buy back the product at 100% the value they sold it for
I didn’t realize that’s how places stock things?
So why do they go along with a manufacuter sale? Is the manufacturer then offering them money to sell it at that price?
A lot of times you’ll see products on sale for the exact same price at all retailers when that happens.
Yeah that’s funded by the brand, Logitech and other big brands would give me MDF and scanback on every product sold during a promotion (that was pushed by said brand). We would not make as much margins per unit sold but we would move bulk product.
MDF would go to the internal marketing team for producing assets / promoting on our socials. Marketing would also give statistics on volume of products in promotion sold, click through rate / views / audience. All highly sought after statistics.
Grey market importers would have products at a cheaper buy price but would not qualify for scanback.
One person from my team had committed a PO for the wrong quantity of a product (100 units instead of 10)
But due to our good relationship that brand helped us run a promotion on that product which ended up being exclusive to our stores and moved lots of flight sticks. We wouldn’t have that kind of support if we were purchasing from a grey market importer.
The other side of retail is a fun experience, but for hardly above minimum Australian wage it wasn’t worth the stress.
Edit: Speaking of LOGI, they were a great bunch to be on the good side of. New release products had stellar margins for our stores, as long as we kept on the MSRP, not following MSRP would lead for us not not receive initial batches of stocks on future launches.
The key phrase is “while supplies last”. They can’t import more, so third party resellers can only get rid of what they already have.
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The fact that they seem to really have expected a Biden “pardon” is absolutely hilarious to me.
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?
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Obama did veto an ITC ban on Apple before but Masimo is an American company unlike Samsung.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A statement (via CNBC) from the Office of US Trade Representative Katherine Tai said the agency “decided not to reverse the ITC’s [International Trade Commission] determination” after “careful consideration.”
The ITC issued the ban after finding that Apple infringed on blood oxygen saturation technology patented by a company called Masimo.
It also ordered Apple to stop selling any previously-imported devices with the infringed-upon tech.
While Apple attempted to block the decision while awaiting an appeal, the ITC denied Apple’s request, and the other chance of intervention was a veto from President Joe Biden, which didn’t happen.
Apple will also continue selling the Watch SE, as it doesn’t come with a blood oxygen sensor.
But both of those methods might not be enough to satisfy the ITC, which is why Apple could always choose to settle with Masimo instead.
The original article contains 259 words, the summary contains 138 words. Saved 47%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Struck by the very thing they love to do.
Hey Siri…define “hoist with his own petard”
“The ban only affectrf Apple stores in the US.” Top notch journalism. If only there was a way to easily see if there are typos in your text…
I guess that’s the 1 time patent laws help the working class compared to the 999 times it hinders them.
I’m an Apple fan but… yeah, they deserved this one.
And somehow it’s already been overturned
How badly do you have to screw up for the United States to crackdown on you as a private company?
