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The Oxygen-Saturation Edition Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Apple To Halt Apple Watch Series 9 And Apple Watch Ultra 2 Sales In The US This Week, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

The move comes following an ITC ruling as part of a long-running patent dispute between Apple and medical technology company Masimo around the Apple Watch’s blood oxygen sensor technology.

The Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Apple Watch Series 9 will no longer be available to order from Apple’s website in the U.S. after 3 p.m. ET on Thursday, December 21. In-store inventory will no longer be available from Apple retail locations after December 24.

Apple Plans Rescue For US$17 Billion Watch Business In Face Of Ban, by Mark Gurman, Bloomberg

Engineers at the company are racing to make changes to algorithms on the device that measure a user’s blood oxygen level – a feature that Masimo has argued infringes its patents. They are adjusting how the technology determines oxygen saturation and presents the data to customers, according to sources familiar with the work.

[...]

Work within Apple suggests that the company believes software changes – rather than a more complicated hardware overhaul – will be enough to bring the device back to store shelves. But 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.

Stuff

Apple News+ Now Includes Sports Coverage From The Athletic, Wirecutter Coming Soon, by Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac

Apple today announced a new partnership with The Athletic and Wirecutter, which will see their content included in the Apple News app. The Athletic sports coverage is now accessible to News+ subscribers, and Wirecutter product review articles will be coming to the News app for all users early next year.

Notably, these publications are owned by The New York Times, which pulled its content from the News app more than three years ago.

OmniFocus 4.0.1, by Agen Schmitz, TidBITS

OmniFocus 4 redesigns its Fluid outline layout to provide quick access to the item details most relevant to you, brings inline editing for adding new items or quickly editing an existing item without leaving the outline, enables you to customize which fields are included in the redesigned Inspector, and allows Forecast items to be structured as a single flexible list.

Definitive Apple Store Field Guide 'Facades' App Gets Major Update, by Michael Potuck, 9to5Mac

The comprehensive and definitive Apple Retail field guide now features a timeline view with grand opening details and store opening gifts, custom lists, visit receipts, search filters, and much more.

Adonit Note+ 2 Review: Affordable Stylus Delivers Pressure Sensitivity… Kind Of, by Josephine Watson, Creative Bloq

If you’re a fan of Adonit’s first-generation Note+ stylus, get excited; the second generation is here; the Adonit Note+ 2 comes equipped with improvements galore, offering 2,048 pressure levels, two shortcut buttons, and interchangeable nibs of varying hardness.

Eve Announces New Matter Outlet, Light Switch And Blinds, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

Smart home company Eve Systems today announced several new Matter-enabled smart home devices, including the new Eve Energy Outlet and updated versions of the Eve Light Switch and Eve Motion Blinds. With Matter integration, all of the devices work with HomeKit.

Notes

Apple TestFlight Servers From 2012 To 2015 Leak, Containing Terabytes Of Data, by Liv Ngan, Eurogamer

Data scraped from the servers for Apple's TestFlight service circa 2012 to 2015 have been leaked, giving access to tens of thousands of iOS apps and games.

[...]

TestFlight is a service for developers to release iOS apps for testing. Files on Apple's servers were found archived via Wayback Machine and then shared anonymously to X (née Twitter). Links to the archives can be found quite easily by entering "TestFlight leak" into your chosen search engine.

Bottom of the Page

It is surprising to me that all the backstage maneuvers -- and I assume there are backstage maneuvers -- are not working to allow Apple to continue selling the Apple Watch.

What I am not surprised is Apple willingess to not make a last minute licensing deal when they think they are in the right.

Sometimes, they do end up to be correct. Sometimes, like the butterfly keyboard fiasco, not that much.

~

Thanks for reading.