Apple Stops Selling The Latest Apple Watch In The US
Apple has stopped online sales of the latest smartwatches, Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2. After December 24, they will disappear from the company’s regular stores.
Apple’s warranty policy for smartwatches has traditionally implied the replacement of defective watches with working ones of the same model, and no repairs as such. Now that the import of all Apple wearable devices into the United States that allow measuring blood oxygen levels is prohibited due to a patent dispute with Masimo, Apple’s proprietary service has lost the opportunity to exchange failed Watches of previous generations with this function for working ones. Post-warranty exchange according to a similar scheme, for which Apple customers had to pay extra, is also being discontinued.
It is unclear how long the ban may last. Bloomberg has learned that Apple engineers are trying to change the way they measure blood oxygen levels and how they present that data to the user to avoid violating Masimo’s patents. However, the copyright holder states that its complaints are related to the hardware, which may mean that software tweaks are not enough to solve the problem. Hardware changes may take at least three months to complete.
