Masimo Sues U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Over Apple Watch Blood Oxygen Ruling

Christopher Yasiejko, reporting last week for Bloomberg Law:

CBP exceeded its authority in an Aug. 1 internal advice ruling that overturned its own January decision without notice or input from Masimo, the medical-device maker said in a complaint filed Wednesday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. Masimo brought claims under the Administrative Procedure Act and the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause.

The CBP ruling is available here. As I read the CPB ruling, Apple’s argument goes something like this:

Masimo’s patents (the validity of which Apple disputes, but that’s neither here nor there for this ruling) cover a non-invasive device worn on the user’s body, that reads blood oxygen levels by shining light of various wavelengths through the skin, computes the reading on the device, and shows the result on device. With Apple’s workaround for watches sold in the US, the computation and the display of results occur off-device (on the paired iPhone), and thus the “redesigned” blood oxygen feature doesn’t violate Masimo’s patents.

The CBP’s investigation centered around whether the Masimo patents were “limiting” — which seems to mean a device that does all these things: the sensors, the computation of results, and the display of results. Masimo argued that the patents weren’t limiting, and apparently made no argument for how the import ban on Apple Watches should stand if the patents were found by CBP to be limiting. The CBP asked the International Trade Commission — the outfit that instituted the import ban — whether they considered the Masimo patents to be limiting, and the ITC responded yes, they did, that that was the entire basis of the import ban.

Masimo’s new complaint against the CBP makes mention of Apple’s Trump-pleasing series of announcements related to investments in US manufacturing, leaving it to the reader to interpet the implication that there’s a quid pro quo at play with the CBP ruling. But the CBP ruling’s timeline makes clear that much of the investigation took place during the Biden administration in 2024. It reads to me like that same decision would have been made, at the same time, if Kamala Harris had won last year’s election. But that’s the problem with a pay-to-play corrupt government like Trump’s, and Tim Cook’s willingness to play along to any degree, no matter how mild. By currying favor with Trump, it now looks like any decision from the U.S. government that goes in Apple’s favor might be because Apple curried favored with Trump. I genuinely do not believe that’s the case here. The ITC ruling was based an interpretation of Masimo’s patents that they were limited to user-worn devices that read, compute, and display blood oxygen levels non-invasively, and given that U.S. Apple Watches no longer compute or display the results, they no longer violate Masimo’s patents.

★ Wednesday, 27 August 2025