This is indisputable The Apple Watch played a key role in the popularization of smartwatches. Of course, Apple wasn’t the first smartwatch to hit the market, but the Cupertino approach, particularly focused on quantification and health features, has been pretty much universally adopted by the industry. As I’ve mentioned on other occasions, this is nothing new as we’ve seen Apple set the trend on other occasions.

This is not always easy, and sometimes it means that the expectations placed on new versions of devices are not fully met. This year, for example, the iteration of the smartwatch brings the interesting novelty of the double-tap gesture, and the rating it received in the exhaustive review we published was quite high, but in terms of innovation it is not a particularly relevant generation, which is partly due to the difficulty of consistently maintaining such a high pacealthough in this case it may also be related to plans for the X series.

Technology, as you already know, is an extremely competitive industry in whichPatents play a key role… sometimes in favor, sometimes againstand the protection offered by the possibility to register the technology as its own guarantees ensuring the investment to complete your research, especially if we are talking about companies that are threatened by larger ones, but in many cases this also translates into excessive restrictions. , patent abuse and more.

In this case, coming from a distance, it seems that it would be a big fish that tried to eat the small one, although as always it is best not to make an absolute statement, because it can happen. Be that as it may, and as we have expected for two months, As of today, it is not possible to buy the Apple Watch Series 9 or Apple Watch Ultra 2 in the United States. And I say it was expected because the United States International Trade Commission ruled on it on October 26 and gave two months to implement it. A period in which Apple tried to stop the measure, but failed.

This conflict, as I said, has been going on for a long time, as we already informed you about it about two and a half years ago, when sales of the Apple Watch Series 6 were threatened. The origin is located inLegal actions performed by Masimo, a medical technology company specializing in the development and manufacture of sensors and other non-invasive patient monitoring tools. For years, Masimo has been accusing Apple of infringing five patents it owns on a system for measuring oxygen in the blood (oximetry).

Many They expected the current President of the United States, Joe Biden, to use his privilege to prevent the sentence, but in the end it didn’t, so Apple was forced to stop selling it. This way, if we enter their online store for the US market, we will see that the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 continue to appear there, but when entering their shopping section, we will be told this: «After December 24, 2023, Apple will no longer sell Apple Watch units with the ability to measure blood oxygen in the United States.»

At this time, there is no prediction on Apple’s estimates of when sales will be able to resume, even if there is one spoke out against the decision and subsequently appealed against the measure. US buyers looking to get Apple’s smartwatch, meanwhile, will have to make do with the Watch SE, which doesn’t have blood oxygen measurement and continues to be sold as a regular.

With information from The Verge.