So this is a weird one to end the year on. For about a week, you literally could not buy a new Apple Watch Series 9 or Ultra 2 from Apple. Not "sold out," not "supply chain thing" — Apple pulled them off its own online store on December 21st, then yanked them from the physical Apple Store shelves too, three days later, on Christmas Eve of all days. If you walked into the Apple Store at a mall this past weekend looking for a watch for someone, congrats, you got to watch an employee awkwardly explain why the display models weren't for sale.
The short version, for anyone who missed it: a medical device company called Masimo has been in a patent fight with Apple for years over pulse oximetry, the tech that reads blood oxygen through your wrist. Back in October the International Trade Commission sided with Masimo and issued an import ban on any Apple Watch with the blood oxygen sensor in it, which is basically every current model except the SE. Apple appealed, asked for a stay, got denied, appealed again, and in the meantime just... stopped selling the watches. During the single biggest gift-buying week of the year. I cannot imagine that was a fun set of meetings inside Apple's legal department.
Then, earlier this week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit granted Apple a temporary stay while the actual appeal plays out, and Apple started selling the watches again on the 28th. So this whole saga, at least the "you literally cannot buy one" part, lasted about a week. A very inconveniently timed week.
I've got a Series 8 already so none of this directly hit me, but I've got a friend who was mid-way through buying his mom an Ultra 2 for Christmas and had to just… not. He ended up doing an AirTag and an Amazon gift card, which is the gift-giving equivalent of a shrug. And I'll be honest, my first reaction reading about this wasn't sympathy for Apple, it was mild delight that a company this size can still get tripped up by a patent dispute in a way that actually costs them real retail days. We spend so much time talking about Apple like it's an unstoppable machine that operates above the normal rules of business, and then a mid-size medical device company in California gets an ITC ruling and Apple has to pull product off shelves during peak season. Feels almost quaint.
The blood oxygen thing itself is a little overrated as a feature anyway, in my opinion — I've had it on my watch for over a year and checked it maybe four times, mostly out of curiosity rather than any real health concern. It's one of those specs that sounds essential in a keynote slide and then just sits there unused. If Apple ends up having to ship future units with the sensor disabled via software to get around the ban (there's been chatter that's the workaround they're eyeing), I doubt most people even notice. The people who'll actually care are folks tracking sleep apnea or altitude stuff, and that's a real use case, just not a majority one.
Separately, and only sort of related: the New York Times filed suit against OpenAI and Microsoft this week too, over training data. That one's going to be a much bigger, slower-moving story than a watch getting pulled off a shelf for a week, and I don't have anything smart to say about it yet that a hundred other blogs haven't already said better, so I'll leave it there for now and maybe come back to it once there's actual case filings to dig through instead of just press statements.
CES is only a couple weeks out, first week of January, and the usual pre-show trickle of "leaked" gadget news has already started clogging up my RSS reader. Every year I say I'm not going to care about CES and every year I end up refreshing The Verge's liveblog with a cup of coffee like it's a sporting event. Anyway. If you were one of the people who couldn't get an Apple Watch this week, sounds like the wait's basically over. Small victories to close out the year with.