It was probably much cheaper to just gut their consumer engineering team instead. The whole company is focused a lot on medical devices Apple wants no part of, they just want the consumer part.
Though it feels like an oversight to me. In this field, like in telecom modems, patents mean a lot, so I also wonder why didn't Apple seek to buy out the consumer part of Masimo along with their patent portfolio. Maybe they did the math and saw that fighting Masimo later in court over their patents is still cheaper.
Yeah it seems like it was cheaper in the short run but will likely be extremely expensive in the long-run.
- loss of sales of watches
- either battling in court for who knows how long or settling out of court for god knows how much money.
The real move would have been to just.. Grow a team internally. I mean come on, ox sensors? They couldn't have figured that out without poaching a well established med-tech company?
Same reason you don't see too many "Connects to Apple Watch" pieces of gym equipment floating around. Apple doesn't want to get into the gym equipment or medical device manufacturing business.
> Why wouldn't they want to enter the gym space at the least?
We're still waiting for Peloton to be profitable. Since Apple's fitness customers already have Apple hardware, they might as well sell you their own version of the service Peloton provides without occurring the expense of producing Peloton-equivalent hardware.
